When she saw it lying cracked and empty on the grass, Sarah stopped daydreaming about getting a dog and knelt down to examine it. She had seen robins’ eggs many times before, but the bright, early May sunshine made this one glow like a jewel. She felt sure she had never seen anything more beautiful in her life.
When Sarah felt something strongly, she didn’t rush to tell someone about it, not even her mother or father, or her best friend Susie. She stopped to soak it in for as long as she could; then she thought about it and enjoyed it in her mind; then later, calmly and seriously, she might describe it to someone. Her mother called it “mindfulness,” and told her she was a wonderful girl and to never stop doing it. Her father said she exemplified Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, which she didn’t understand, but the tone of his voice, and the gentle scratch of his beard on her cheek when he hugged her were clear enough.
She knew if she touched the shell she would crack it more, so she contented herself with gazing at it, her nose a bare six inches away. There was a smell of grass from where she knelt in it and, just at the edge of vision, a buttercup. Together, they made the eggshell even more lovely.
Sarah’s thoughts took a sharp turn, even as her gaze held, unmoving, on the cracked blue shell. She knew all about sex, of course. She knew that mother birds laid eggs, and that unless they were fertilized by father birds, they wouldn’t hatch into anything. She knew that she, too, had a lifetime of eggs inside her, and that when she was older a father could fertilize one of her eggs, and then she could have a baby and be a mother.
But were her eggs as perfect as this blue robin’s egg?
She knew about growing up, too. She wanted to be a medical researcher, like her mother, or maybe a teacher, like her father. Maybe both; her parents said it was possible to be both.
The eggshell suggested other realities to her; things she hadn’t thought about much. She had never seen baby robins herself, since the nests were too high up to climb to, but she had heard their wheezy cries, and seen pictures of them – all gaping mouths and ugly, featherless bodies – and knew they ate worms that their parents barfed up for them. Kind of gross, to come out of such a pretty egg. Out of such a beautiful egg.
And even if her eggs were as perfect as the blue robin’s egg, would her babies be as ugly as baby robins?
Aunt Rachel had taught Sarah to give her little cousin Anna her bottle, and to burp her and change her diapers. Anna wasn’t ugly. She wasn’t as beautiful as this eggshell, but she wasn’t ugly, and she was fun. You could make her laugh. You could make her face light up.
Sarah stood up. She roamed the yard, thinking. She climbed the young rock maple in the corner and sat quite still in it, watching the squirrels and the woodpeckers in the oak opposite her, and the grown robins hopping in the grass, listening for, and occasionally finding, worms.
It was time to go inside, if she was going to get her homework done in time. She climbed back down and went in and did it as quickly as she could and still expect to get an A. Her parents came home, and they had supper together. Her mother looked over her homework. They watched a couple of shows on Nick at Night, and then her father went to grade papers and Sarah got ready for bed. Her mother came to tuck her in.
“Mom? You know how birds have eggs, and I do too?”
“Yes, honey.” Her mom wore the expression she got when she was trying not to have an expression.
“Today I found the shell of a robin’s egg. It was very pretty.”
“Yes. They’re such small things and so lovely.”
“That’s right. So, when I have eggs, will they be that beautiful? I know they’ll be teensy, but if you could see them?”
Sarah’s mother kissed her on the forehead. “I hadn’t really thought about it. But now that you make me think about it, it occurs to me that one of mine turned into my beautiful girl.” She went to the light switch and paused. “I think that makes human eggs at least as beautiful as robins’.”
Sarah wasn’t sure this was true. She lay thinking, after her mother had turned out the light and gone back downstairs. If ugly baby robins could come from pretty eggs, couldn’t pretty human babies come from ugly eggs?
Her parents said that sometimes it was good to imagine the most wonderful things you could think of, even if they weren’t necessarily true.
Sarah fell asleep thinking about the eggs inside her, blue, perfect, beautiful.
Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash
