SAGE ADVICE: Hope—and the egg—floats

By MARK SAGE/Columnist

I’m not sure who won. My oldest would tell you it was him, sure enough. Me, I’m not even sure there was anything to win at, just some eggs doing passable imitations of boats. OK, so it was a lot of eggs and the imitations weren’t all that passable. Even after we discovered that a section of shell from peeled hardboiled eggs will float, it wasn’t any craft you’d want to take out in deep water. The slightest twitch of water would send the shell sideways, filling the cup with water and forcing the little colored scraps to the bottom. We, and by we I mean my sons mainly, threw 50 eggs, give or take the handful that wound up in the dog’s stomach first, into the water. Some of those ended up in the dog’s stomach, too, after she figured out how to hold her breath, open her mouth and grab the treat from the bottom of the creek.
It was a lot of fun. Almost as much fun as watching the two boys gather the 50 or so eggs in their wheelbarrows. Baskets, in case you were wondering, appear to be so last year. At any rate, watching kids run behind wheelbarrows is always fun and worth the price of admission. It’s the same principle that makes NASCAR races at Bristol so popular. You cram all those cars into a half-mile oval and there’s bound to be some crashes that make you go “oooh.” And there were. Wheelbarrows filled with colored eggs tipped, as one-wheeled devices are prone to do, especially when parked on a fairly steep hillside. Big rocks sent barrows, eggs and all, airborne, resulting in a whole mess of spider web-cracked eggs. Little eyes, intent on the search, ignored, as little eyes intent on searches are prone to do, various pieces of fencing jutting from the ground, various piles of cow manure covering that same ground and machinery parts that though sharp and possibly useful for other applications were simply just in the way of one more egg. It was, at the risk of simplifying too much, fun. Plain, good, all-American, Easter fun (minus any scratchy suits or uncomfortable shoes).
When the last egg had been gathered, we went inside to warm by the stove. There they recounted every step they’d made, confident that we hadn’t been watching, recording every step they’d made our own selves. And we listened as if we hadn’t, because it was good. It was in there that the plan was hatched to see if Easter eggs would float. We still don’t know the answer to that. I’m leaning toward no, but they do sink with a certain slow style that might give a casual observer the impression that they do indeed float.
We left Easter Egg Creek (my new name for the branch that finds its way above and underground through my father-in-law’s farm) wet, cold and tired. The sugar had worn off, replaced by a crankiness only found at the tail ends of Halloween and Easter. The air, sometime between the hiding and the sinking of the Easter eggs, had turned winter raw. The profane had come again.
As we were leaving the farm, my wife said she had to go to the bathroom. She set the cruise control at 55 mph. I told her to slow down when we got to the 45 mph zone. She told me again that she shouldn’t have drank that last Pepsi and kept right on cruise controlling until the lights flashed behind.
That’s when the profanity came, from me, though only in my head. I learned long ago that the question “What (expletive deleted) were you thinking?” rarely receives a good, rational, well-thought out answer. Even rarer still are the times that such a question doesn’t make the questionee hate the questioner. So I kept my thoughts and my profanity to myself, repeating over and over “Easter Egg Creek, Easter Egg Creek, Easter Egg Creek.”
Contact Mark Sage at 228-6611 or .