one/fifteen/twenty-one

We are averaging three eggs a day, which is enough to get us by on weekday mornings. But the quiche cups I send with Craig for workday breakfasts, the Spanish tortillas for dinner or lazy weekend mornings, the odd lunchtime egg- we never have enough for those and so we're supplementing. They taste just enough different, their yolks looking just slightly less sunny than our own, that I've thought about spring and summer once or twice this week. It doesn't help that winter isn't offering much in the way of snow.

This past week we put in orders for 2021's meat birds and a new flock of layers, the latter surely motivated by our paltry (though to be expected) daily numbers. It's only January and hatcheries have limited supplies. Some breeds are sold out entirely while others aren't available until so late in the season that their arrival is impractical for our little homestead in Maine. I've been unable to find a reliable source for hatching eggs- local or non. Elsewhere seed sellers have rules about who can order when, some even shutting down their ordering for periods of time to meet the overwhelming demand in a timely and organized way. It's made me feel a fresh rush of panic to find things once so widely available now picked over or completely unavailable so early in the season, but I also think- maybe this is a small silver lining to everything that 2020, and now 2021, has brought us. I hope it means there's a collective shift toward feeding ourselves and neighbors, that as grocery stores ran out of eggs this spring and began rationing meat, that people asked themselves- what will my community do when the well runs dry?