Spring

Eggs and more

Dear Flour Fans,

I started a post about grain education info last week, in lieu of not attending the Northern Grain Growers Conference in Burlington. Knee repair kept me at home, and I spent last weekend icing that knee as a storm raged outside. I wondered why I had chosen to have this surgery when so many people can’t make basic choices, like feeding themselves, because they are facing war and other human predations.

Today is a sunshiny day, so different from last weekend’s ice and snow. I have a sturdy PT who is helping me see that discomfort is part of my recovery, and I’m looking forward to celebrating Easter.

I am blessed with many families. My relatives will come here Sunday, and my non-blood relations, the extra families that became tied to mine as my second son grew up, came over last night. Felix is home from Buffalo for a job interview. He has extra siblings in these two families, and my husband and I have good friends in the parents. On the spur of the moment we ate together, a big pot of spaghetti and lots of smiles. I got to eat hamantaschen, and to wag heads with my pals: how have our babies grown?

Time is here and gone, always. Out the window, I look at the shaggy wreck of our beloved white pine, a tree that was far taller than our house. Ages ago, my husband told me not to get attached to this tree, because the limbs of white pines are notoriously weak. The combo of beautiful ice and heavy snow lobbed off most of the limbs, and the top. Trees are upended all around us, near houses, in cemeteries. Many people were without power for days. But I feel hopeful because we are on the cusp of spring.

Icy pine, downed pine, and not half the pine it used to be, but still beautiful.

For Sunday, I’m making a bread with poppyseeds, apples and pecans, celeriac salad, and lamb, using recipes from Olia Hercules, and a celery root from the garden. At the co-op, I got fresh yeast for the bread because it is such a fun thing to use. Frothy and blooming, it is just so different than sourdough or dried yeast. (If you can’t find some in a store, ask at a nearby bakery. Many of Olia’s online recipes call for fresh yeast, and I’ve found good info about yeast and conversions here.) Another delight was finding pecans from New Communities, a cooperative and part of New Communities, a foundational land trust in Georgia co-founded by Shirley Sherrod.¹

I have to look at the bread schedule and get planning, but I know the run of the day: before we eat we will decorate eggs, and draw on the tablecloth my mother started when she was a nursery school teacher. Kids drew inside the magic-markered outlines of eggs and bunnies she drew, and each year, it gets harder to find room, but we’ll just make our bunnies and decorations smaller.

Eggs are a great mystery to me. I don’t like the taste of them, and even skipped going to nursery school because I didn’t want to eat scrambled eggs. I skipped sleepovers, too! But I love how chickens gobble our food scraps in the yard, and I love the eggs they make. I love what eggs do to baking, and I love thinking about the symbolic potential that eggs represent. These beautiful ovoids can become so many things.

In 1997 Jack and I had an egg balancing party on the Equinox in our backyard in Seattle. Eggs supposedly stand up on the Equinox, so we got a bunch of people together to test out this folklore. Jack was exceptionally good at balancing eggs, which is not surprising. A dancer and tree climber, he can balance most things very well.

Pictures from that day made their way into a digital poem I made with my friends Ellie and Andrew for the Sanctuary for Independent Media — a great resource here in Troy. They even run a community radio station! Here are my musing about eggs.

I hope you are having a little bit or a lot of joy in your life, planting seeds, baking Kulich in a coffee can, or loving looking at the daffodils that nearly want to show their faces.

Love, Amy

1. I found a good recording about this, and other Black land trusts that New Communities has inspired here.