A Shell-Less Egg

If you have ever been around chickens and eggs you have seen a shell-less egg. I currently manage about 20 chickens, feeding them and picking up their eggs. This week I came across a shell-less egg. There is a membrane just inside the shell, you will see it when you crack eggs open but here that is all holding the egg together: a thin membrane. It is a miracle it was not broken by other chickens since they tend to lay in the same “nest” and I will most often find a dozen eggs in one roost while the others sit unused. So here is this egg with no shell among nine other eggs fully shelled.

On the farm in Indiana where I grew up we had a “chicken house” where we had thousands of chickens for their eggs. One of my first jobs was collecting eggs and feeding chickens. We would run into shell-less eggs quite often but most of the time they were broken, rarely were they intact. When they were my mom directed us to bring them her and not throw them away. Our egg customers wouldn’t take them because they are not “perfect” but mom wanted them because they were the same to her. She took the shell-less eggs because she knew that if you treated them with a little care they were the same as shelled eggs. She baked with them and she made a breakfast of scrambled eggs and our favorite French toast. She treated them with a little care and they gave all of us exactly what “normal” eggs did.

I think that kind of sums up some people I know too. Some of us are born with something missing or some kind of disadvantage. Too often those are thrown away or beat up early while vulnerable. When all they need is a little care in the beginning and they will turn out the same as all of us.

In seventh grade all I cared about was basketball. School was only a means of being able to play basketball with my friends and against other teams. We had a small school so EVERYONE who wanted to be on the team was on it (we only had 8 boys in my 7^th grade class). But one of the boys in my class was small, really small and no matter how he tried he could not participate in the sports of his peers. Small and fragile among BIG Dutch farm boys who love nothing more than pushing and shoving each other in a game, this young boy was left on the sidelines.

I don’t know how and when it happened but he became one of my best friends in school. Sure he had a shell-less exterior but his insides were the same and he was a fun and funny, fantastic friend.

Sometimes those shell-less eggs are simply the best. All they take is a little care and understanding.