The season of egg salad has arrived.
Spring is a sacred time for all religions–a time of renewal–buds on the trees, plants poking through the ground. I was told by one of my farming mentors Wiccans advise planting parsley on Good Friday and say it’s auspicious to get root vegetables in on the first whole or waxing moon in May. I’m not sure why Wiccans reference Good Friday, but I kill enough things that I need nature on my side.
People born in the Christian tradition know that spring isn’t about planting, escaping Egypt or renewal, it’s about ditching hard-boiled eggs. I thought about that this morning while eating a bagel at a local coffee house in the presence of my Jewish friend. I felt bad because it’s one of the last days of Passover, but not as bad as I’m going to feel in the next week trying to eat all the boiled eggs the boy and I colored. No other religion besides Christianity has to get rid of so many eggs.
Coloring eggs is cool. Kids go nuts. Every household with kids knows the week after Easter is when you reap the consequences–the eggs make you want to gag. The day after Easter, ummm, tasty egg salad. The second day, a cold boiled egg with coffee for breakfast, but after that I start to feel oppressed. Like it’s the prison camp menu de jour–de every jour. So I count… only twenty more dozen to go.
I tried to solve this problem by boiling only the number of eggs we’d actually eat in a reasonable time, but that didn’t work. The boy wanted to color more. It’s hard to say no to a time-honored holiday tradition. So I made what the local chickens sent, a lot, while at the same time realizing I was creating a method of torture the Grand Inquisitor would use instead of the rack.
My parents handled egg control differently. They enticed the three of us to have contests–who could make the best decorated eggs and the craziest ones. We cut little pieces of tape, making mosaics on the eggs, dipping them in many different colors. We replicated Fabergé. We took a half-hour on a single egg. We made crazy designs around the cracks. I now realize that they weren’t trying to encourage art or patience, they were reducing the number of eggs they had to eat for the subsequent month.
Declan won’t help me by eating a single egg. Yet he caused the problem.
I just ate about fifteen deviled eggs. Today they were good. Tomorrow, we’ll see. I collected some recipes to give myself the illusion I’m not eating eggs every day, but my palate won’t be fooled. There’s no solution, really. Unless…
Next year, I’m going to hide egg rolls. I don’t think I can get sick of them.
