Tiny Surprises

Robin usually gathers the eggs in the evenings. I like the idea of gathering them into a pretty basket, like I envision folks doing in the "old days," but he puts them in an egg carton. They are much safer that way since they must survive the two-mile journey to our house in a worn-out pickup truck with two farm dogs who sometimes vie for the front seat. When I open the carton, I never know what I'll find. There could be only two eggs, or six or eight. There's almost always a bantie egg or two, and they are always clean and white. The other eggs come in a variety of sizes and colors; small, medium, large, or whopper, and white, beige, brown, or sometimes light green or blue. (The colored ones come from the Araucana chickens, which are bred to lay such eggs). Every day there's just a bit of anticipation as I open the carton to see what the hens came up with. This was yesterday's crop:

There's the two white bantie eggs, as usual. The two beige ones are probably bantie eggs as well, but their hens are a bit bigger, I guess. The two brown eggs would probably come in as large according to store sizing. The biggest one is actually light blue, from one of those Araucana chickens. And then there's that tiny one. Do you see it? It's smaller than the already small bantie eggs, and it's green!

This is the greatest egg find yet! I was working at our county fair yesterday evening and didn't get home til late. I was tired and almost forgot about cleaning eggs. When I opened the carton I was thinking about getting a bath and a good night's sleep more than the day's egg crop. Imagine my surprise when I saw that tiny green egg! I turned on more lights to make sure my eyes weren't fooling me. I put the eggs away in the frig, and pulled them out this afternoon to take some pictures. Because the eggs were cold, and the weather so hot and humid (thanks to the final throes of Hurricane Issac), they began to sweat almost immediately. That's why they look wet in these photos - they were!

Here's the tiny treasure, compared to a quarter, a nickel, and a dime.

And here it is compared to what I used to think was a tiny white bantie egg:

Compared to the brown egg, it's getting smaller!

And it makes that big blue egg look rather like an ostrich egg.

We're thinking this little prize must have come from one of the little chicks we raised last spring - perhaps her first egg. Maybe she is a cross between a bantie and an Araucana. If so, that means we'll be getting miniature colored eggs! Won't that be fun!

I suppose there are folks who think me silly, taking so much pleasure from an egg. There certainly are bigger and flashier things to get excited about these days. I like to think, though, that finding a little joy in something so mildly out of the ordinary is a sweet little leftover from my childhood, a tiny remnant of child-like wonder fighting to survive inside this middle-aged grownup.