Birds and squirrels are acting twitterpated, to quote the movie Bambi. They seem sure that Spring is just around the corner. I watched two gray squirrels chasing each other up two prongs of a tree, then, as if choreographed, they both jumped, criss-crossing each other in mid-air to land on the opposite prong. So funny! In the same tree, two red-bellied woodpeckers chased each other up and down and around until they both flew off into the woods. Twitterpated. Yes indeed.
The ground-creeping rufous-sided Towhee is back at the feeders, pulling cleanup duty on the ground below. These birds look very like robins but have a different shape, a long perky tail, and the gray area is much darker. They also have white bellies. The Towhee is one of my favorite birds for its sweet song and cute bobbing walk.
Inside the house, spring cleaning continues, ahead of spring but I know that once the weather warms up I will have little time for it. So it's getting done now while I am mostly house-bound. It's funny to think how once I spent hours outside in winter and loved it. I still like being outside in cold weather but my asthma doesn't enjoy it so much, and even inside I find myself a bit wheezy. So now I just go out for short periods, and confine my activities indoors.
This morning I made biscuits, a treat that I don't make often because neither of us really need those calories. I also made a fruit salad, and fried apples to use up a few apples that were getting soft. I hate to waste fruit--or any food, for that matter. With eggs fried in light olive oil, and apple butter for the biscuits it was quite a morning feast. Hot coffee was the finishing touch. Our usual breakfast is soft-boiled eggs and sourdough toast, much lighter on the calories.
Speaking of eggs, Larry is making egg salad at the moment, trying to use up a bit of our egg surplus. The hens are working overtime, it seems! It will be good with the leftover biscuits and a salad for lunch.
There are some things about eggs most of learn experience. For instance, a good egg will sink in water, but a bad egg will float. A well-done boiled egg will dry quickly when taken from the water; fresh egg, when boiled, will be a mess to peel; old eggs are glassy and smooth of shell, and might not be a good idea to use.
Did you know that at one time farmers scattered eggshells on their fields, believing that eggs represent fertility and would bring them a good harvest?
Then there is this English rhyme:
Break an egg, break a leg;
Break two, your love is true;
Break three, woe to thee.
In Ireland, people left empty eggshells outside to provide shelter for the fairies. However, others believed that witches made boats out of eggshells and used them to travel from place to place, Witches must have been quite small!
A double-yolker, as we call the eggs with two yolks, were believed to bring good luck. In reality these eggs usually indicate a young hen just beginning to lay, or an older hen getting ready to stop laying.
An egg left on your doorstep can be very bad news, or very good, depending on what culture you are from. In Brujeria (Spanish/Latin witchcraft) it's very bad--means someone has put an evil spell on you. To break the spell you must urinate on the egg and then sweep it into the trash without touching it (who would want to?). But the egg would also indicate someone wishing you good luck and/or fertility. I'll take that meaning, thank you.
Sometimes--again, usually when beginning to lay or ending a hen's fertility--a hen will lay a very small egg. I mean like robin's egg size of smaller. In Appalachian lore, these eggs should be thrown onto the roof of your house to placate the witches. We've always just mixed them into scrambled eggs. I wonder if that was a good idea.
There are many, many other egg superstitions. Here are links to a few:
Learn Religions website
Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.
I love 'farm' eggs, as I call them. I have two every morning and consider it a great start when I get a double-yolked farm egg.
ReplyDelete100% agree! I love starting my day with eggs. I feel deprived when we have something different.
DeleteMy poor girls are laying few and far between right now. I think they would love spring to arrive. From eleven hens I am currently getting 4 eggs a day with one or two soft ones that break in the nesting boxes. Funny to think of tiny witches floating around in eggs shells! -Jenn
ReplyDeletePoor things---yours have a harder life than ours for sure. We've had that problem with soft-shell eggs before. As I recall, they needed more calcium in their diets. We bought oyster shell or something like that for them. I thought it happened with aging hens more often but I don't know if that's true or not. This website gives some information about the problem https://blog.cacklehatchery.com/why-are-my-chickens-laying-soft-eggs/
DeleteI decided, when I was about four years old, that I didn't like eggs and I must have been in my forties when I decided to give them another try. I've been trying to catch up on my lifetime quota ever since!
ReplyDeleteSo funny how we make those choices in childhood. My granddaughter Grace won't eat egg yolks. Her brother would only eat scrambled eggs. When our son Tommy was little, there was a commercial on TV that showed two eggs frying with the message, "this is your brain on drugs." After he saw that he refused fried eggs the next time we made them, insisting that they were "drug eggs!"It took a while for him to understand the message of the commercial.
DeleteI'm not a farmer, but I do save my eggshells, crush them, and use them in the gardens. When I plant bulbs, I scatter a layer of eggshells atop the soil because I think it deters mice and chipmunks from digging up my bulbs. And when I mix eggshells in the soil, I'm adding minerals...so I guess fertility is my goal, too :)
ReplyDeleteWhat a fascinating post, thank you. I love reading about folklore it is always so interesting. We crush our shells here and add them to the compost, we sometimes put the straight on the soil as a slug deterrent. We love eggs here, sadly we don't have room for our own chickens, so we buy from a local farm a tray at a time, all the 'misfit' eggs that he can't sell on.
ReplyDelete