My Life, Eggsactly
One of my first memories of Easter was when I was very young probably around three years old. We were living in an old house in Woodbury, NJ, and it must have been raining or cold because my family decided to have an Easter Egg Hunt indoors instead of in the yard. I remember my dad standing on the wooden staircase which lead to the second floor, holding an open bag of chocolate eggs in his hand. The tiny eggs were wrapped in foil pastel colors. I felt very knowledgeable about eggs and chickens because my mom and I had recently read a book about them, so I remember wondering what type of chicken these eggs had come from. My brother, sister, and I gathered at the bottom of the stairs, and my dad lifted his hands tossing the eggs up into the air. My brother and sister, who were older and had more Easter experience, jumped into motion gathering up the eggs, but I froze thinking they were all going to crack and break into a goopy, eggy mess. My brother ripped the foil off one of the eggs he had gathered and popped the chocolate into his mouth then he dove for more eggs. By the time I realized the eggs were chocolate, there were only a few left for me.
My grandmother Dorothy was a science teacher, naturalist, and wildlife rehabilitator. Sometimes her students or people in the town would bring her wounded or baby animals they had found, and she would do her best to get them patched up and returned to the wild. One afternoon I was staying at her house while my parents were out, and a man drove up the driveway and got out of his car. He had a small shoe box in his hands, and he carried it up to the front door. Inside the box were some oblong, dirty, off-white eggs that the man had found in his yard. My grandmother identified them as snake eggs and told the man to put them back, and they would be fine. The man sheepishly explained his wife was afraid of snakes, so he could not bring them back home. He left a few minutes later without the eggs. My grandmother took them out onto her porch where she had incubators set up and put the eggs in one of the tanks. Every day I visited her so I could check the eggs. Some times I thought I even thought I could see movement inside them. One day I came to check the eggs, and there were small garter snakes in the incubator. Grandmother Dorothy and I released the snakes into the backyard that afternoon, and watched the babies slither away. I was sad saying goodbye, but my grandmother told me that I would see them again since snakes didn't travel very far from home, and she was right. Every spring and summer for years, I would catch a glimpse of our garter snakes in her yard.
Once my dad decided to take my mom and me for a ride in the country in his 1966 red convertible Carmengia. My mom and I tied our hair back in colorful scarves, and we set out on a beautiful sunny afternoon. The city quickly disappeared and all that surrounded us were farms, woods, and blue sky. After about an hour my dad turned down a dirty driveway, and we stopped in front of a pretty white farmhouse. A friend of my dad's came out of the house, and he showed us all around his farm. He had pretty black and white dairy cows, some gray horned goats which tried to eat my dress. He also had lots and lots of chickens, and several showy roosters strutted around the yard too making a fuss. My dad's friend gave me an egg carton and brought me over to the hen house. He showed me how to gather the eggs without disturbing the roosting hens. When he showed me the eggs in his hand, they were the most amazing green color. I had never seen green chicken eggs before. That evening my mom and I read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, and then we had a delicious dinner of green eggs and ham of course.
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