To gather the eggs your own chickens lay is a bliss — when we had chickens it would leave me struck with wonder absolutely every day. Frozen in my tracks as I walked back from the chicken coop, I would hold that egg, slowly turn it around in my hand, and let the mystery of it fill me with light and warmth.
One morning we were woken by the screams of distress from one of our chickens, Chrysanthemum, as she was carried away in the jaws of a fleeing animal — likely a bobcat — who seized a chance that had opened up because the night before we forgot to close the gate to the chicken coop. Lulu and Comet, the other two chickens, were left inside the coop in shock, and we were left with one less beautiful bird. Of the three, Chrysanthemum struck me as the one who had the most motherly instincts, in the sense that she was sitting on the eggs longer than the others, perhaps hoping a chick would hatch. She was always in the box, sometimes sleeping all night on top of the eggs.
Later that day, when I gathered the eggs from the coop, I counted three, and I knew one of them was Chrysanthemum’s last egg. I once more froze in my tracks, enchanted by this humble wonder, by what Frances Hodgson Burnett’s described, in The Secret Garden, as “the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs.”