The Sixth Borough: The Tradeoff of Fresh Eggs
Sometimes I click on "Last-Minute Getaways" from Travelocity. I'm particularly vulnerable when I'm on deadline. That's when I get in really deep, clicking further and further until I'm a mouse tap away from booking a room. The Trout Room, perhaps.
The Trout Room is a suite at the Pitcher Inn, a hotel in Vermont where husband Joe and I stayed when I was pregnant. A relative had given us the gift of a night there. When we saw our room, we started giggling like lunatic criminals. There was a fire going in the giant fireplace. The wall was lined with antique canoe paddles. We jumped into the massive bed, whose headboard was carved from a gnarled tree, its bark and littlest branches still attached. This was a once-in-a-lifetime weekend, or at best, once-in-the-next-30-years. Maybe we'd come back to this very room to celebrate our retirement.
As it turns out, I was right to assume that our honeymoon-ish excursions were about to come to an abrupt intermission. But it's not because there are now three of us. The baby is mobile (and flies free!). It's because of our chickens.
We love our 48 chickens, don't get me wrong. They are incredible and fascinating creatures, full of personality, and we can't shut up about them. At weddings, and, okay, even at one funeral, you can find us off a little ways gossiping about our girls with an aunt in Los Angeles who has six hens. Cousins stroll over, listen for a second, roll their eyes and walk away.
Everyone should cohabitate with chickens. They're okay in single-digit and 100-degree weather. They rode out Hurricane Sandy and puffed up their feathers through the polar vortex, laying eggs all the while.
And oh, the eggs. I had never really looked at an egg ? why would you? ? until two years ago now, when Joe came in one morning carrying two little bluish green beauties. We consume seven of them every morning: three for each of us and one for the baby. We feel like the nouveau riche, the redneck one percent, now that we have enough that we can give away dozens when family stops by. And this winter we started selling them to friends and co-workers.
The last time I felt such a thrill at receiving a little cash was in first grade, when my friend and I set up a "tag sale" on the road outside his house, trying to hawk odds and ends we'd found in his garage. No one stopped, so my friend's mom sent his brother out to buy something (which probably belonged to him in the first place). I forget what he bought, but I remember that dollar.