suddenly finding a chicken egg in the nesting box each day has called me back to my collection of eggs, domestic and wild. the arrangement above includes the first three beauties from our beauty, prim, a red-winged blackbird egg found floating in our pond, a cardinal egg left behind by our backyard mama this spring, two quail eggs found in the produce section of united noodle in minneapolis, a goose egg found at the bottom of our lake near a reed bed, and the broken egg of, we think, a turtle dove (tourterelle) from the languedoc region. i don’t know what it is about finding eggs, but our kids run to us with more urgent wonder after finding eggs than after any of their other, often remarkable, natural finds. feathers, scat, bones, frogs, dragonflies, wildflowers, road kill, mushrooms, nests–nothing seems to compare to the contained, jolting, ovoid beauty of an egg found unexpectedly among familiar surroundings.