Out of The Frying Pan

When I was six or seven my mom used to take me to one of her friends houses to be watched while she was at work. The woman had girls about my age and a little bit of acreage that she made work as a small farm. They had horses and ducks and chickens. I loved going there. I loved the smell of the fresh manure, the mud and the old farm house.

If we were good, her daughters and I were sent to get the find the eggs in the chicken coop. It was a sort of game for us - to find which eggs had been abandoned behind old boards pile of hay and to steal the warm ones from under the hens without getting pecked by them. The rooster would chase us the whole time we were in the coop, guarding his little biddies fiercely.

Giggling, we would bring back the dozen or so brown and green and white eggs, placing them in the kitchen for their mom to separate and chill. She would set apart a carton for my mother, and the rest she would place on the shelf in her fridge, the speckled eggs waiting patiently to be devoured by us children.

One day she decided that she would make an omelette for our lunch and plucked a few from our basket to be prepared. I watched eagerly as she split them on the sizzling pan.

"You have to go slowly, and watch for blood," she said. "Sometimes there are baby chickens inside."

As she spoke her hand was cracking eggs, not looking for blood, focusing on telling us this very important detail.

CRACK. SPLAT.

And there lay a bloody chicken fetus, right before my eyes.

I didn't understand this event at all. I watched on horrified as she calmly scraped the frying chicklette off the pan into the trashcan. As a farmer she was not unfamiliar with this kind of death, but for me it was traumatic. I will always remember that unborn creature limp on the cast iron. And to this day I check my eggs for blood as I crack them, lest some factory worker has forgotten to cull the baby chickens from the good eggs.

So it is with counting your chickens before they hatch. Most people can't tell which ones are going to be fluffy yellow peeps and which ones will SPLAT on the pan. Perhaps they will go to market or perhaps they will be an new hen in your house, but me, I'm no farmer and so my eye can't discern this just by holding an egg in my hand.

In case you are completely lost, I am talking about France. And no, I'm not giving up. I'm just...changing my perspective. Once I let certain ideas about the whole thing go I found that my options opened right up. Which tells me a few things about pinning your hopes in certain ways on certain people. ...You know, to be completely vague.

After spending the whole of Monday in bed feeling sorry for myself, I decided that it would behoove me to let some things go. It felt amazing, almost like I was in control again. I even put on makeup. It's a miracle what a little mascara will do for your perspective.

So today I will tidy up my space because I STILL don't have work. I will pick a few things to sell and post them so I don't feel like a total loser for not going to a job. I'm going to bake some banana bread with these lovelies

and do some writing and then have a Sex and the City party with my girlfriends. If I get really ambitious I may even do some art work. Remember way back when I used to do that? Yeah, I discovered that I still really love it. (SURPRISE!)



And all this sure makes the time go by more quickly while waiting for my eggs to hatch.