“Chicken Eggs 29563-360×480 (4899748717)” by Emilian Robert Vicol from Com. Balanesti, Romania – Chicken Eggs_29563-360×480. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

For no conceivable reason, I’ve decided to relate another childhood memory, something I haven’t done here in a while.

I grew up on a farm outside Kenyon, a small town in southeast Minnesota. We operated what they now call a “diversified agricultural operation,” which means we grew and raised whatever we could think of that would earn back worth the trouble.

One of the things we raised was chickens. I’m not sure how many we had; maybe about a hundred; probably less. The numbers fluctuated, I’m sure. In any case, one of the daily chores was to “pick the eggs,” to gather them from the box nests we had for them in the chicken coop. I have breathed a lot of powdered chicken manure in my time; it accumulated on the floor and we just walked on it. It dried fairly quickly. A doctor told me I have a spot on one lung that’s common in people who’ve worked with chickens; it might come from those days.

After the eggs were gathered in a pail, we took them into the house and down to the basement. There we would wash them in a special solution, swishing them in a bucket with many, many holes, inside a larger bucket of the washing solution, clockwise and counterclockwise until they looked clean.

Then the person doing the job would take them to another room in the basement, where we kept the Big Egg Carton. There was a stool there for sitting on and a bright light hanging from the ceiling. Each egg would be examined for cracks, and any lingering crud on the eggs would be sanded off with a sandpaper block. Then the eggs were placed in cardboard trays inside the big carton, several layers stacked one on top of the other.

(Eggs with cracks were kept for our own use. We kept them in a regular egg carton, the kind you see in stores, on a counter next to the stove. We didn’t bother to refrigerate them. We used them up pretty fast.)

When the carton was full, we’d load it in Dad’s Studebaker pickup and take it to town. There, in the southeast corner of town, near the railroad tracks, was Carl Larson’s poultry operation. Continue reading Remembering Carl →