Eggs For Sale

Using a teaspoon I fished an egg out of the steaming hot water in the pan and into a pale pink pot eggcup. Just holding my hands over the pan was burning from the heat of the boiling water and I had to drop the egg carefully back in on my first attempt at getting it into the eggcup. I got it on the second go though. I turned round and with one hand I took the lid off the bin and set it on the floor. Sitting on the step into the kitchen I began peeling the egg, dropping the pieces of shell into the bin.

The music playing on the stereo was softly drifting around me, slowly starting to rise and release its drama and I relaxed into it while I was peeling the egg, letting it take over the air around me.

I tapped all around the top of the egg creating a spidersweb of cracks and used the spoon to prise the cracks away letting the shell pieces fall into the small maroon bin. The heat of the water had caused some premature cracks around the sides of the egg so pushing the teaspoon into these edges gave satisfying shell peeling results. As I picked off small pieces of shell I leaned into the music and floated up on its beautiful stream of lights, irridescent and incandescent and light. I thought about the man I was peeling the eggs for, my husband, sitting behind me at the dining room table facing towards the kitchen, also listening to the music. I was making him his Sunday breakfast and he would make me my Sunday morning cup of tea. Sunday morning had been started this way for almost every Sunday of the two years we had been married for a joint decision we made on our honeymoon.

Walking along the quiet green hot road back from Port Isaac there was a little wooden sign that had scratched upon it 'EGGS FOR SALE £1.50 PLEASE LEAVE MONEY IN TIN' .
We found the little box of eggs in a yellow wheelbarrow at the side of the road and a tin on the wall above. We left the money in the tin. The next morning, a Sunday morning I woke up early to the bird song and freezing cold and left our little bed made from a blown up mattress piled high with five or six blankets and sleeping bags. I put on two jumpers and a coat and crawled out of the little tight entrance of our tipi into the cold September morning sunlight.

On returning from the loo at the bottom of the track I filled the little metal kettle from the big white water bottle and set it to boil on the stove near the tipi entrance. I filled a pan with water, placing it on the stove also and upon boiling I sunk two large fresh eggs into the water using a teaspoon. My new husband woke to the sound of the kettle whistling and the eggs bobbing against the pan.

During our breakfast we relected on what a nice tradition it would be to always have eggs for breakfast on a Sunday. We have added fresh coffee and marmite on the toast to the meal along the way.