The Egg Woman
Clamor of questions, you clamor of answers. Here’s your egg. (C.G. Hanzlicek)
Jeanne lives with her dogs Pi and Jake in a shambling little house up the canyon where no floors are level and no angles right, and the driveway is so steep your calves start to ache before you’ve reached the top. When the dreariness of the wood-paneled rooms in that house became unbearable, Jeanne brightened the place by single-handedly plastering all the walls.
She also built kitchen cabinets, installed a wind-powered generator, and tore down an extraneous partition. She routinely seals leaks, fixes fences, diagnoses problems with the pump, repairs water lines, and tends to an extravagant garden. She owns a small business in town selling wholesale textiles, and she started making custom fabric covers after teaching herself how to sew. She paddles a kayak, paints landscapes in oil, and cans raspberry preserves, lavender-scented vinegar, and sun-dried tomatoes. She also raises chickens.
I can hear the chickens whenever I pass her house, and sometimes their crowing and squawking carries on the wind into my own backyard. It’s a lunatic sound, and I love it. Jeanne started with seven chickens, but inherited more, and they have multiplied tenfold. They are all hens, except for Elvis, Wayne, and Romero, three stereotypically cocky roosters certain of their place in life. This fowl crowd has the run of the parcel. I see them strutting around ridiculously in their outlandish feathers, and I cannot help but laugh at the sight. Jeanne’s house, which has always been the scene of impressive one-woman industry, has thus also become a madcap zone where clucks and chuckles hang in the air, punctuated by sporadic rooster screams. There's something about chickens that makes me not take myself so seriously.
Jeanne sees the humor of them too, but mostly she sees the eggs. “What a beautiful, perfect creation,” she will say of an egg, whether white, pale blue, or brown, cupping a small one carefully in her hand, or marveling at the size and smoothness of another. “A miraculous thing. Sustenance in a shell.”
She has set up a sign and an honor box just outside the gate to her property, and for five dollars a dozen, neighbors can buy fresh eggs. They are superior eggs; there is no doubt…the flavor fresher, the yolks more yellow. They are somehow the essence of egg, and this is a good thing, even if you didn’t know you had been missing it.It’s a lot of work, keeping this egg operation going.
Last summer Jeanne designed a large and comfortable chicken apartment so the girls, as she calls them, could settle in more safely and comfortably at night. Two days after it was finished, the infamous Gaviota winds kicked up, and an old oak tree weakened at the core by fire fifty years earlier finally snapped and crashed directly onto the brand new coop. The coop was smashed beyond repair, and a couple of hens were crushed, and Jeanne took a deep breath, cleared up the mess, and rebuilt a little further from the trees. “Chicken Little was right that time,” said Jeanne.
That’s what I admire about Jeanne ––her astonishing resilience and self-reliance. She’s creative, determined, and brave. But if you tell her this, she will respond that she had no choice. When she was in her twenties, her husband perished in a diving accident in the North Sea while employed by a major oil company that did not accept liability even though its negligence was evident. Jeanne suddenly faced a legal battle across the sea and sole responsibility for the support of herself and her baby daughter. There wasn’t even time to grieve. “When there’s no one else to lean on,” she has said, “you have to lean on yourself. You figure out what you need to do and you do it.”
I know I’ll never be as independent and capable as Jeanne, but she inspires me, and although her chores and projects keep her busy from morning until night, she also has a sense of fun and a genuine appreciation of what it means to live here. Sometimes when I ride my bicycle past her house, I’ll see her working in her garden and we’ll shout across the creek the way housewives used to shout over backyard fences as they hung their laundry on the line with wooden clothespins, except that we’ll be talking about secret chanterelles, or wild strawberries on the ridge, about tides turning, hens laying, and last night’s orange moon.
Or she calls me on the phone to tell me that she glimpsed the bear who has been eating the apricots, or saw Monte catch a wave beneath the arch of a perfect rainbow. She will excitedly announce when the leaves of the cottonwoods have turned their brightest yellow, or invite me for a walk in the lull between rainstorms.
Those walks between rainstorms used to be a favorite activity of ours, and we are definitely due for one. We'll wear our tall rubber boots so we can splash around in puddles, walk in the mud, and most importantly, stomp out channels to divert the water that pools in the road. We believe the latter is a helpful service for those who drive up and down the canyon, but mostly it’s just fun. There’s something satisfying in seeing the currents of water rushing down the side of the dirt road through the conduits we’ve created, and a great sense of accomplishment in observing the newly drained aftermath. Pi, meanwhile, will intently sniff out critters in the grass and good things dead and smelly, and then bound up the hill in futile pursuit of a distant deer, or out of pure jubilation, which is his general frame of mind.
Once we had a diamond day. For hours the ambivalent sky held out bright stretches of blue along with an ominous layer of darkness, and when raindrops finally appeared, they did not fall but hung in the air, suspended and glistening, infused with sunlight, like a crystal-beaded curtain, a veritable veil of diamonds. Jeanne and I were giddy with it, fully enchanted, walking through the sparkle. You never know around here what form the magic will take. You just have to be present and lucky. Come to think of it, if you are present, you are by definition lucky.
But living here is hard and constant work. Rain and wind and sunlight take their toll, fire danger during summer is omnipresent, and nature is forever encroaching the spaces we have momentarily claimed and tried to tame. There are weeds to whack and brush to clear, potholes to fill and surfaces to seal, rocks and fallen trees to be removed. Fruit must be gathered before birds and bears get at it, the nuts are waiting to be cracked, and wild pigs must be fenced out.
The agricultural and household water systems require constant diligence: pumps and pipes, valves and tanks, all in need of maintenance and monitoring. There are solar panels and batteries and back-up generators to tend to, and the pantry better be stocked before the rain comes, and there’s always some door that keeps sticking, or a broken screen, or an unreliable phone line. Meanwhile, there are spiders in the bathtub, ants ready to converge on a carelessly dropped crumb, desiccated husks of deceased sow bugs heaped beneath the couch…and rodents busying themselves in the hidden crannies of dwellings and the engines of cars.
And there is dust, so much dust––the outside is forever getting in. Ranch life is a work in progress and a labor of love, and one must quickly shed the illusion that it will ever be possible to sit back and be finished.
Around here, though, we believe strongly in the fortifying power of ice cream. And of course Jeanne makes her own, starting with a fresh egg custard base. She approaches ice cream as she approaches everything…boldly…often infusing it with lavender from her garden, or adding an unexpected dash of cumin or red pepper that you wouldn’t expect to work but somehow does. It’s like crafting a life, I think: we use whatever ingredients we are given, even the dissonant ones, and make something worthy of it.
Jeanne confronts the variables with imagination and an element of fearlessness, even the difficult parts, even the partings.When I dwell on my own losses and bewilderments, Jeanne provides the comfort of her friendship. We are a pair of pilgrims in this canyon, searching for sense and finding it sometimes, speaking freely to each other. Jeanne is thinking lately of her elderly father, ebbing away with Parkinson’s, barely able to speak. Last time she visited, he hugged her, and his hug said all she needed to hear, and there were shooting stars that night, and she saw them as a shower of departed souls, free from pain and suffering. Perhaps it is so.
One spring day when scents of orange blossoms and jasmine hovered in the air, I pedaled my bike to Jeanne’s house to buy a dozen eggs. The world was so beautiful I could barely look straight at it; everything was blossom and song, everything yearned to live and live forever. There were purple irises on the hillside, and patches of lupine and bright yellow daisies, and I noticed that my fledgling rose bushes were budding up, and on the road I caught a fleeting glimpse of a small bobcat bounding into the brush. When I got to Jeanne’s, she introduced me to her brand new chickens. Tiny, peeping balls of fluff, they had been hatched in Iowa on Saturday morning and were now ensconced in their California digs. A few feathery girls wandered by, and Romero crowed.
“I am the Egg Woman,” said Jeanne, escorting me past the garden and back to the road. “It’s a good role, and I’m proud of it.”
Boosted by chicken manure, things were growing well. The wisteria above the barn had burst into bloom, tall gawky hollyhocks bordered the fence, and bees buzzed about fragrant tufts of lilac. Jeanne gathered some flowers into an impromptu bouquet and wedged it into my backpack with a carton of eggs. I pedaled home carefully.