Eggs in a Basket

Back in the early days,
sometime before 5th grade,
when the chickens still lived in the shack by the burning barrels,

I'd gone to collect eggs. And, while I was gathering the last few out of the straw in the opposite corner, the one with the lean neck - the one I'd dubbed 'Black Beauty' overturned the basket I'd left carefully at the top of the few cement stairs at the entrance. She'd leaped up to perch on the handle and in a few wingbeats, toppled the basket and eggs out onto the cold stairs -- I saw it begin, but couldn't stop it in time. The eggs cracked and spilled. Only the few in my hand were saved. The chickens rushed to eat the others. I felt terrible.

Not only would I return to the house with a paltry few eggs, but the others were wasted and it was my fault. Normally, we collected eggs in rust-dented Maxwell coffee cans which 1) the chickens rarely took interest in and 2) are more stable and solidly cylindrical. But this day, I'd been showing off to myself. I'd passed up the cans for a basket - the woven kind with a shallow basin and handle arched over top. I'd been feeling fancy, quaintly colloquial, and was playing my imaginarily scripted role of deftly-intentioned child egg collector and with a properly aesthetic basket.

It was the basket handle which attracted the chicken, the shallow basin which rolled and tipped, and my selfish game and subsequent carelessness which broke the eggs. I was afraid of what Mom would say to how I'd failed.


Trembling slightly, I walked back to the porch to turn myself in in early twilight. My mother was already standing there. I climbed each stair. Beginning to cry, I told how I'd lost the eggs.

The voice that came in reply lifted my head in surprise. She seemed unconcerned with the eggs lost and quietly stated that it wasn't my fault that the chicken had tipped the basket over. I don't remember the words, but I remember her even voice and comforting presence through sob-strained and blurred hearing. I hadn't expected that. I'm not sure if she was even looking at me when she said it. In my memory, her height and stature exceed my range of vision and she seems to speak mostly to the hill in the north, fading as the twilight moved in on the tails of sunset to borrow the hill, fields and forests, saving them for later.

She suggested we go for a walk then, she and I. We walked toward the cooling sunset and she told me about her dreams for the forest and trails around the house, how she wanted to plan places to sit and take in the view. We talked about which overlooks could be best taken advantage of, and I described to her the ones I liked. In her gift of descriptions, she let me come in close to things close to her. Perhaps, I only remember walking because of how she described her visions for the land and trees - in my memory I am transported in the same gray evening air from the porch to the site on the hill where she wants to put a bench.


This is one of the closest memories of I have to my mother. Now, it seems well worth the eggs, and that whole thing is so insignificant except in what it led to.