Ice Baths and Egg Shells

My son is sitting at the kitchen island about to eat soft boiled eggs. One egg rolls around while he peels tiny crushed shards of shell off the other. I don’t know how he’s going to eat the soft eggs with bits of shell everywhere. It’ll be a crunchy mess. I find an egg cup tucked in the back of the cupboard and perch the unpeeled egg inside. He taps the top with the side of a knife and picks at the shell until there’s an opening big enough for a spoon.

It’s time to tell him about Mac. 

We moved from our little yellow house in Fredericton when I was not quite three years old. I know this because we left in the summer of 1976, when my younger sister was just five months old. I turned three that October. 

I have flashes of memory from that time: our little yellow house surrounded by little houses on a little circular street. Jumping on the top bunk, being just small enough to not hit my head on the ceiling. A red Tupperware cup tipping over and juice slowly inching across the counter, heading for the record player that sat below the counter on the other side. Visiting our neighbours the MacNamara’s who I decided were my grandparents. Mary greeting me at the side door and sitting me down at the chrome-rimmed table next to her husband Mac. Mac slicing the top of his soft boiled egg in one fell swoop, and giving me the tiny lid filled with cooked egg white, my favourite part. 

I was only a toddler, but I was an intrepid adventurer. Always curious, always social, always looking for friends and something good to eat. Did I leave the house on my own? I imagine my mother at home next door, nursing a baby. My older sister Sally too shy to leave with me. Were these memories stitched together from later times, while visiting Mac and Mary? Or did I walk next door verging on age three, through the grass that connected our houses, the grass that would produce dandelions on our side in the summer, and Mac would say, don’t let those dandelions blow onto my lawn. 

I don’t know; memory is slippery. But I do know that Mac could smoothly slice off the top of his boiled egg with a butter knife and I would eat it, this delicate offering, with salt from the shaker and a tiny spoon. 

I tell my son about Mac as he eats his egg. He’s not sure what I’ve told him is true. A toddler at the door arriving for breakfast alone, crawling up to eat with her elderly neighbour, and slicing the top off a boiled egg with one fell swoop? But he smiles anyway. It’s a charming story, and now he’ll have something to work on.

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I didn’t mean to write about memory and navigating egg shells. I had tuna salad in mind, a really good one recommended by Local is Lovely in her newsletter 5 Things to be Cheerful About. I always love it when authors add what they’re watching, eating, listening to, reading, or thinking about at the end of their newsletters. It’s a direct and helpful window into who they are, and what they love.¹ That said, I’ve made this ‘more salad than tuna salad’ recipe many times in the last month or so. The recipe reminded me to soak vegetables in an ice bath to keep them crisp and crunchy, and to dry them in a salad spinner. That I can add radishes and thinly sliced fennel too. That canned tuna can be sophisticated. And if I add boiled new potatoes, green beans and hard boiled eggs, the salad becomes a modified Niçoise. I whipped the latter up while away with my brothers and sisters in law last month, and this was all that was left. 

1. I’m thinking about

Maggie Mackellar

directing me to Archie Moore’s exhibition Kith and Kin at the Venice Biennale, or

Claire Cameron

’s top tip that Spotify has added audio books. Claire recommends Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie.

What are you reading / cooking / watching/ thinking about?