Amy Bowers
An Essential Cord
The eggs from my backyard chickens, multicolored and gathered daily, fell from the top shelf of the refrigerator and laid on the floor: cracked, quivering, and oozing in a smooth gesture of bullshittery. Twenty-two broken eggs. Twenty-two is also the number of years I have been married. My marriage is slowly falling apart in nonspectacular ways. Lack of communication, latent anger, radical reassessments of life choices. We have filed papers. It is the curse of middle age, and nearly all of my friends are going through something similar.
I did not swear, nor did I get angry, because frankly, as a stay-at-home mom, I spend a lot of time cleaning up messes. Cat vomit, dog piss, breakfast cereal effluvium; last week, I even cleaned up human shit. So the eggs were not remarkable. I sat on the floor with a roll of paper towels, a garbage can, and cleaning spray.
But I could not get ahold of the eggs’ viscera. They were slimy, yoked together with surprising elasticity. As soon as I thought I had captured something of substance in my crumpled paper towel, the logy whites slipped free and splattered back to the floor. I decided to try to break down the goo by whisking it with my fingers, making a semi-cohesive mess that might be easier to lift. I began rubbing them back and forth, breaking yolks and whites. I was entranced by the slurp and bubble of the concoction. As a longtime chicken owner, I love to think about the mechanics of eggs. My three teenage kids walked by. One by one, each made a worried face and hustled out of the kitchen, hoping to avoid being the one roped in to the cleanup. If I have taught them anything, it is that you have to clean up the messes you make.
There are so many things I cannot get ahold of these days. I cannot comprehend my parents aging, environmental ruin, my teenage children, the dissolution of my marriage. But in that moment, cleaning the eggs, I was relieved to deal with a slippery, physical reality—everything focused into a tentatively manageable mess.
* * *
I want to talk about some of the parts that make up an egg:
The bloom is an invisible waxy substance that coats the outside of the egg and plugs the shell’s thousands of pores. It’s nature’s plastic wrap. If you don’t wash it off, eggs can stay on the counter for a few weeks, protected from spoilage. If you wash your eggs (or buy them from the supermarket), the bloom is removed, and the eggs must be refrigerated; they are now susceptible to bacterial invasion. Most Americans don’t know this; our cleanliness often undermines our ability to stay healthy. Tidiness is not the same as safety.
The cuticula is the thin, papery lining of the eggshell. Eggshells are porous, and the cuticula is an extra barrier lining the eggs. I have heard that if you get a splinter, you can stick a piece of cuticula on it, wait for it to dry and shrink up, and it will pull the splinter out. Maybe one can lay sheets of it on one’s face as a beauty treatment.
The air cell is a pocket of air that grows as the egg ages and begins to dehydrate. That is why, when making hard-boiled eggs, it is good to use eggs that are a week or so old; they peel easier. If they are too old, they’ll float in a bowl of water. That is not good. Do not eat those eggs. The margin of time between perfectly aged and rotten is thin; it can go either way.
The chalaza is a little umbilical cord, a tough, squiggly membrane that holds the yolk in place in the middle of the eggshell. It is a springy stabilizer, ensuring the yolk’s integrity. It is an essential cord, like your beliefs, superstitions, or even another person; it brings you back to the center.
I do not understand much in my life at the moment, like how my husband and I built a beautiful but flimsy life on silent assumptions. Our wracked marriage, and by extension the world’s troubles, are not amorphous messes like broken eggs on suburban floors. They are just systems to understand, each component essential to the whole. I need a bigger view, a blow-up schematic of everything. I find comfort and perspective by looking at whole spaces—rooms, hearts, bodies—turning them over and hoping they will reveal something to me. I need answers, and tools to protect my children and myself.
Last spring, one of our chickens, Meredith, a silver Wyandotte, was attacked by a hawk. We had yet to install the bird netting on top of the chicken enclosure, and the hawk swooped in and slammed into Meredith’s neck, attempting to carry her off. I startled the hawk, who flew away dissatisfied, and my kids and I spent the day watching Meredith closely. We’ve had a full menagerie of animals their entire childhoods, from nightstand mice in glass aquariums to backyard tortoises. My kids, now nearly adults, are adept at dealing with the sudden emer- gencies that come along with pets. Meredith could move her legs and stretch out her black-and-white-striped wings, but could not stand or lift her head. A heavy drizzle began to fall, so I wrapped her up in a towel, placed her in a plastic recycling bin, and carried her inside. “She is dying now,” I told my kids. “Let’s just keep quiet and let her know we loved her.”
But she would not die. She laid there, sometimes stretching, sometimes just looking at us. One time she gurgled watery air bubbles out of her nostrils. For twenty-four hours, the pendulum of impending death and false hope swung. We sat vigil. We researched and wished for a resolution. Finally, I took her to the vet, who told us Meredith had severe nerve damage and might recover but would never hold her head erect again, and we would likely have to feed her by hand for the rest of her life. We decided to euthanize her. My friends all laughed when I told them I spent a hundred and fifty dollars to end the ordeal, and wondered why I did not just chop off her head with a shovel.
I love the idea of amulets, even something like a battered pie tin. I am always looking for ways to protect myself and those around me. I just don’t feel that safe in the world. My neighborhood group reminds me regularly to lock my car doors and to look out for the coywolf that attacks dogs going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I carry a piece of black obsidian in my pocket to protect me from psychic negativity. The cold glass stone is heavy and my hand stays tucked deep in my pocket. Like the lava it once was, its power courses under the surface, out of sight and ready to break through. I read metaphors into everything. Even broken eggs feel like an attack on something sacred. Eggs, those little portable wombs, ensure my family has nutrient-rich protein. We might not need them now, but having them available adds a layer of comfort.
When I go to a museum, I find myself looking for art that suggests ways to breathe and survive in a tumultuous world. I want strategies; I am curious to know how artists navigate the world and the stories they tell to get through it. Modern art takes me in. Georges Braque’s shattered and flattened bodies, still vibrating with life, feel akin to my own fractured self. Huge abstract expressionist paintings articulate pain and gesture through Adolph Gottlieb’s thick, blasted, brushstrokes and Jackson Pollock’s thrown ribbons of house paint. Mark Rothko’s fields of contemplative, immersive color beat and shimmer like a heart in the gallery. They remind me of the world, my world, falling apart. In each, I am consumed and held for the briefest, most holy moment.
But now, I am not looking for an aesthetic or emotional response. I need practical solutions. For this, I turn to art rooted in the physical world. I study Mary Cassatt, who threw herself into her work with renewed vigor after her parents’ deaths. She built an estate and an atelier of her own, and, with ink on her fingers, redrew the boundaries of printmaking. Miriam Shapiro’s quilts stitch time into fabric. Kara Walker sculpts pain into sugar. Dana Sherwood feeds jeweled jellies and meats to the wildlife in her yard. These women show me I need time and space to evaluate my labor and my life. Things might need to be broken apart to be understood.
And folk art: little stone goddesses to hold in your hand or plant in a field, giant wooden performative masks, Japanese clay dollhouses that accompany the dead to their graves. All these things catch my eye. Their materiality and instance of themselves.
On Easter Sunday, my nonreligious family and I head into New York City to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, eat pastrami sandwiches, and watch egg hunts in Central Park. While at the Met, I come upon a case of Ethiopian healing scrolls.
The scrolls, still used today, are cultural tools that are used and influenced by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders to heal physical, mental, or psychic illnesses. Made the length of the patient’s body, the scrolls contain specially chosen prayers and texts, along with patterns and images of faces, demons, angels, and, especially, eyes. Lots of almond-shaped eyes. Before the scroll is written on, a live goat is rubbed all over the patient’s body, connecting the two spiritually. The animal is then sacrificed and its blood and stomach contents are rubbed into the patient’s skin. This begins to transfer the illness from the person to the animal. A parchment scroll, made from the animal’s hide, is painted with rows and columns of words, patterns, and images. In the final step of the ritual, the scroll is held up to the infirm while prayers are chanted. The patient focuses on those many wide eyes. If all goes well, the demons that caused the illness will look from the patient’s eyes onto the scroll’s eyes and, in a magic transmission, be extricated out of the body. Looking outside of oneself can heal.
I printed out images of the scrolls and spent days recreating them with Sharpies and watercolors, trying to understand their magic. Balanced mandalas of shapes, lines, and insistent eyes look back at me. I stare back at them and lose myself on the page. The hypnotized making is healing; I imagine what it would be like if I actually believed in what I was doing. But then, I wonder if it is the attention that is the key. The simple attention of being seen might be all we need. The work reminds me of pysanky, the decorated eggs of Eastern Europe. I once sat in a class hunched over for hours learning to make the eggs. It was delicate and time-consuming. The hollowed eggs sometimes crumbled in your hand no matter how carefully you held them.
I used little nails to poke holes on each end of the egg. My lips blew out a satisfyingly mucousy mess, and I wiped the shells down with vinegar to remove the bloom. A stylus, a small wooden rod with a tiny brass cone attached to the end, was heated over a candle and then used to scoop beeswax from a little pocked cube. As the wax melted out of the stylus’s tip, I drew lines and curves and shapes on the egg. I dunked the egg in dye between layers of designs, starting with the lightest color first. Each layer of wax protected the lighter colors until the final dying was in black. As the eggs dried in between dippings, they were set on a bed of nails. Then the magic. I carefully held my eggs over the candle flame, the accretion of wax melted off, and bright and intricate designs were revealed.
I took the class out of curiosity and learned that pysanky’s rituals and traditions have pre-Christian roots. The magical, folkloric power of pysanky has transformed into a heritage craft with artists trying to preserve ties to Slavic culture. Eggs were painted with symbols to ward off demons from the home and ensure good crops, fertility, and prosperity. In the Carpathian mountains of Ukraine, it was believed that a serpent, powerful enough to destroy the world, was chained high on a cliff. Each year, its captivity relied on the quantity and quality of pysanky created. If the tradition ceased, it would break free, and the world would end.
It is not lost on me that women were in charge of creating pysanky, of saving the world. As our divorce proceeds, I wish I could channel my angst into painting eggs and then hiding them under my children’s beds for their protection. In Slovakia, geometric images, beaming suns, agricultural implements like toothy rakes, animal motifs, and goddesses and Christian symbols were written on the eggs in the evenings around Easter. They were shared with friends, priests, and neighbors and distributed all over the village: corners of homes, inside the chicken coop, in the fields, on the graves of loved ones, under beehives, in cow stables.
What is it that moves me about all of this? There is something I like about hands making tangible objects. They are all a form of deep caregiving, not just for one’s family, but for community and even for the world. If you take away the specifics of cultural traditions, it seems like a tenet of human connection is protecting each other by making things.
* * *
Every summer, a few of my hens turn broody. An instinct is triggered, and they refuse to leave the nest. They want to hold on to all their eggs and protect them until they hatch. We don’t have the heart to do what experts suggest: to separate the brooders from the flock, keep them in their own pen, deny them access to nesting material, and remove any eggs they lay immediately. Our method is to remove the hen from the nesting box throughout the day and entice her to stay out with treats such as apple cores and popcorn. When you pick up a chicken that has been brooding for a while, her underside is just slack skin that is very hot. She plucks her feathers out to lay her skin directly on the eggs.
All her efforts are in vain. I feel for her and wonder if she, like me, finds it frustrating to try so hard to keep what she has made.
We tear the broody hens from their nest and gather their eggs. Eventually, they give up trying to hold on to anything. Eventually, they rejoin the flock and lay more eggs.