A Few Short of a Dozen

  Most of the time, egg purchases are made by the dozen or sometimes half-dozen.  Nowadays, these come packed in aggravating plastic, foam or cardboard cartons that do little to protect the fragile egg inside.  Back on the farm, Pop kept several hundred chickens to provide eggs for sale.  As kids, we would pick the eggs from the nest, wash them and pack them for the next morning's delivery.  We packed in a lot worse containers than the cartons of today but lost very few eggs to breakage. The eggs' shells were tougher.  Since we had (what is now called) free-range chickens that got a enough nutrients, the shells were practically hard to crack.  Before I started school, I helped Pop deliver the eggs to folks around town. (These were home deliveries that also included fruits, nuts, vegetables and occasionally a quart of milk or dressed chicken.) For most purposes, the eggs were merely packed in brown paper sacks.  I cannot imagine the eggs of today surviving the trip packed into the back of an old Studebaker, much less, being roughly handled by a five-year-old kid toting them to the door.  The eggs (like most everything) were better back then.

  But this is not so much about eggs breaking except that...well, these eggs did not break.  They, too, survived rough handling and did so for a hundred years or more.  Of course, that said, I should explain that I am not talking chicken eggs here but darning eggs.  For years and years, a few darning eggs survived almost weekly use.  Darning eggs are made of blown glass, marble, wood or ceramic.  The egg is slipped inside a sock that needed mending. (Yep, back in the day, you mended clothing...even socks.)  The smooth surface of the egg aided in sewing (darning) the sock.  A hole could be mended almost flawlessly by even the most novice of seamstresses.  The darning eggs were priceless because of their usefulness and handed down from generation to generation as was the art of darning.  That old adage of "Waste not, want not." was heeded well.  It was actually my grandfather who taught me to darn socks.  He was great about teaching life lessons that have come in handy even some fifty years later.

  A funny little tale attached to these darning eggs comes from back when I was just a kid.  To keep the hens laying eggs in desired nests instead of out in the bushes somewhere, occasionally, Pop would snitch one of the darning eggs to put in one of the nest boxes.  Once the hens noticed an egg, they immediately thought the nest was quite nice and would start laying their eggs there.  There were several times when Pop would forget to bring the glass egg back to the house before Mom missed it.  She would be fretting that one of the kids had broken the darning egg when he suddenly would remember his misdeed!   He would retrieve the egg and present it back to Mom with a sheepish grin.  No kid had taken the egg!  She would reprimand him and remind him of the chicken snakes that often visited the nests.  "What if that snake had swallowed my darning egg!!" she would scold!  As a result, Pop resorted to golf balls.  The chickens were none the wiser.

  Now I have the darning eggs.  They sit idle in a dish in the china cabinet.  Some day, perhaps I will attempt to darn socks once again but I am afraid that I have fallen into the "Throwaway Society".  I find it hard to take the time to mend socks but if I ever do, I have the darning eggs to help me!