Concentricity

These are eggs from my own lovely chickens. Unknowingly, I was a leader in the backyard chickens movement taking place now in the US. Lots of people are doing it, even in the cities.

There was an old chicken house on the property when we moved in, so we got Charlie and the Angels, a nice little flock of three hens and a rooster, and now nearly twenty years later we are up to twenty-six birds.

The Araucanas really do lay aqua blue and sage green eggs. Each breed of chicken has a slightly different egg. Some are even spotted like a wild bird's egg. They all seem to taste the same, though. We feed them table scraps, grass clippings and debris from the vegetable garden, along with their layer pellets. They give us back gorgeous eggs with fluorescent golden-orange yolks.

The eggs are arranged in a hand-carved wooden bowl that says on the bottom, "Iowa 1870." It came from my grandmother's house in Shenandoah. My father's family still lives all around there, and my brother owns the old family farms where the bowl was probably made.

The bowl sits on an old stone we found in the old dairy barn, here in Massachusetts. It was probably used for grinding corn and other grains. If any of you have ever seen one like this and know anything about it, please let me know! I am very curious as to how it was used. We use it as the last step of the back walkway.

Circles, within circles, within circles.

Today is an echo of yesterday, which is an echo of last week, which is an echo of two hundred years ago.



(See this one in LARGE.)