Monday, January 12, 2009

An Egg in my Hand.

I hate eating breakfast when I first wake up. My mother made this a moot point: I would eat, or I would not leave the breakfast table. But after I went off to college, like a fledgling bird turning her beak up on the early worm, I slowly stopped eating breakfast.

I knew it was good to eat food in the morning, that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and all that jazz. But I stopped.

I had tea, instead, with cream and sugar.

Then, I started again. Because I was working real jobs, and couldn't just stop when I was finally hungry and have a much belated breakfast. But it was still hard for me, to wake up that little bit much earlier to make sure I had time to make and eat something.

So I boiled a half dozen eggs, one night, and for the rest of the week I walked out the door with an egg in my hand, to be eaten at my desk when I got to work.

An egg in one's hand is a satisfying thing. It is pleasantly curved, ovoid in shape, light brown in color. It is cold, but slowly warms. An egg in my hand reminds me of being a child, living on a farm. We had chickens, and I would carry each egg like a precious thing in my hands into the kitchen. An egg in my hands reminds me of my mother, and my childhood, and being fed.

An egg in my hand is breakfast.