Eggs-On-End
Posted by Holly at March 22nd, 2009
It is trying so hard to be spring. Technically, it is spring. I could not believe that I missed the moment of the vernal equinox yesterday, a moment for which I happily wait every year in order to stand an egg on end. I have actually done this – and so have others when I have introduced them to the activity. I have seen this. It is completely impressive.
The first time I did it was when I worked for Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I don’t remember where I first heard about it but it was during a period in my life when I was airing a daily, five-minute spot on New York’s radio station, WMCA, about wacky, interesting things to do around New York that were – key words – free or nearly so. I had the idea for the radio spot because I was always looking for things to do with my son that didn’t cost a lot of money because we didn’t have a lot of money. I knew I couldn’t be the only parent in New York City looking for stuff like that and, when I approached WMCA about it, they agreed. I talked about places like the Whisper Wall in Grand Central Station where you can stand in one corner, facing the corner, whisper into the wall and have the person standing in the corner diagonally opposite hear every where plain as day. Or I would find bare-bones productions of plays and operas to see – no sets, no costumes but all the words and music performed live that we could want – for very little money.
We could happily fill our time going to free concerts in pocket-parks, going to the NFL draft (they probably charge for that, now), heading down to Little Italy to find a small, out-of-the-way Museum of Holography. You get the point. The eggs-on-end activity was just one of those things I knew would be fun to do. Not only did we try it at home but, that first year, I got a lot of the people I worked with in the park to gather in my office and try standing up eggs all over my floor. So many of them caught and stood that it looked like a little forest of oversized, inverted snowdrops. Eggs out of place are very funny.
My only office companions now are the four cats who seem to have worked out their own schedule of appearing in front of me to sit down right in front of the computer screen (or, in the case of one of them, to nestle languidly on the top of the printer/fax/copier/scanner) so there is always one of them right there. Charming though they are, and whose sweet companionship I cherish, they cannot be trained to hold eggs. Not even the one with the six fingers on his front paws who can open doors.
So, this year, by the time I thought of it, the equinox was long over. That didn’t stop me from trying while we were cooking dinner. One of my eggs did indeed stand up but, to tell the truth, I think it was more because it caught the edge of a towel fold with just enough leverage to keep it in place.
With or without my spring eggs-on-end, spring is in the air. Even the way the light changes is notable. When I was living in New York, in early spring, when the light began to change as the sun and earth change their perspective of each other, I loved the string of days when the stones of a building at a particular spot on Broadway are lighted in a way that can occur only naturally. No lighting designer, no matter how brilliant, could ever duplicate that see-through air. The building is a bank – or, it was the last time I was there and had been for as long as I had lived on the Upper West Side. The intersection is, itself, unusual. It is where Broadway splits into two avenues – Broadway and Amsterdam – so the corner with the lighted limestone is the bottom end of a pointy ice-cream sugar cone. The sight of that overwhelming and divine light, the experience of standing within it, always makes me weep.
In Cornelius, from our house on the hill, we see spectacular light shows also involving the aspect of the sun. The morning sky has Mt. Hood as the sole actor on stage doing a long monologue every morning. The mountain’s lighting director must be divine because there is little other explanation for the hues and striations of color that saturate the sky beyond as the sun is rising. Such colors of red/gold and velvet lavender/blue glisten in the air. Later in the day, when the sun sets, if the mountain is going to come out from behind its day-time cloud dress, it is brighter than light, if that is possible.
The mountain signals spring; or, more exactly, season change. Sometimes it is less snow covered than others although it does always follow that spring means it loses some of its snow cover. This year, for instance, spring warmth has yet to assert itself so the trees are still pinching their buds closed and the mountain looks more like winter, still holding its cold, but we know it will reveal more of the earth beneath as days lengthen.
Some buds and flowers defy temperature. Little violets are sprinkled generously outside of the windows downstairs; the windows that go nearly to floor level so we have a sense of indoors/outdoors no matter which side of the glass we are on. The two big camellia bushes just beyond have fat buds and some have opened into small blossoms with their arms still wrapped up around themselves for warmth. Bringing some of those blossoms inside produces wide-faced flowers once they feel the room warmth. It’s the same for the magnolia tree outside of my office window. Its big, fat velvet covered buds have been obvious for weeks but the only ones that have bloomed are on the limbs Jim pruned and that we brought inside and stuck in water. We’ve had huge limbs looking like we’re on stage in A Cherry Orchard.
The air is still chill enough that it’s hard to be out for any length of time without some fairly demanding activity. Jim doesn’t complain much about the cold unless he is in the vineyard making his way from plant to plant, each one holding him in place for 10 minutes. Then his toes and fingers start to freeze from too little blood-moving activity.
Most of the time, though, he is whirling with activity. Jim jumps up and into any task he knows has to be done as soon as he finds out about it. I have had to learn to not announce anything I think might need fixing except at time when he can actually go fix it without dropping what he’s doing. Seriously, I would now never say during dinner, for instance, that I thought the roof might have lost a shake because he would drop the meal, get out the ladder and be up on that roof to fix it right then. And he is out there in this season building fences, mending things, pruning things, cleaning out equipment that has sat silent all winter. Not that he was idle during the winter; not by a long shot. It’s just that spring is a differently paced activity. He seems always to have a million things to do to prep for the growing season and seems impatient to get at it each day and impatiently frustrated when the inevitable broken piece of equipment or collapsed fence or other interruption occurs. He knows it will stop him but just doesn’t know when. And yet, he has the amazing patience farming requires to plant sticks in the ground, see into the future for where they will branch out and leaf out and be able to spend years preparing for them and waiting for them. Me, I want the Queen Anne cherry tree we bought today to give me those luscious fruits this year, not the two or three years it will take. I like the little pots of grass wheat we plant indoors for the cats because they are sticking up their shoots in days, not months or years.
Yet, I do like the progress of spring to be slow to have time to savor the essence of new beginnings. I almost like those tender morsels of buds on trees more than the mature flower and leaf they will become. I like the promise of life ahead. It’s a wonderful mystery we live in, believing we will always have enough time and the propulsion to travel through that time to reveal and fulfill the promise.
