The Egg and the Chicken

OK, so I have a yard sale planned for this weekend. Saturday. It's on my list of things That Will Be Done, and to ensure that it happens, I've roped two sale cohorts into the whole mess. And what a mess it is. The house is overrun - more so than usual - with piles of stuff to be hauled out to the lawn in a few days time, dragged into the light, exposing my dark shame. I'm simultaneously excited and horrified. Like watching a suspenseful film, I'm anticipating how great it will all be after it's done. How good it will feel to have done it, even if the while doing it part was hell on my heart and equilibrium. One could argue that it's good for me, but mostly I want to die.

I have this egg. It's a ceramic egg with blue flowers, about the size of an egg. I got it when I was little, in my stocking one Christmas, oh, back in the seventies sometime. Yet, I have this egg. We were tchotchke-oriented (and the dictionary would like me to change tchotchke to "crotchless") and happy enough to have another thing to call our own. (Yes, we each got an egg that year. Our stocking gifts were identical unless there were a variety of colors the item came in - we were three young girls, and really what else can you do with three tchotchke-oriented young girls?) But regardless, I think I need to make it clear that the egg was not by any means a favorite possession.

It's a short hop from tchotchke-oriented to packrat, it turns out. You have to be able to cycle your tchotchkes. I can't do that.

The strongest feelings I have about the egg have to do with what I should do with it. Do people throw away stuff like this? It should be obvious by now that I am not one of those people. Would Goodwill put it on the shelf? To sit alone forever? It might be the most useless item ever. These questions arise every time I uncover the egg, and in every case, it seems easiest to just put it back in That Drawer. Which I have done. I'm tempted to keep it as a talisman - yeah, that's it - against this sort of useless collecting, this faulty redistribution impulse. But it was a gift! What if my dad comes to the yard sale? What if he asks me about the egg one day? What will I tell him? I need to see what my sisters did with their eggs. Dollars to donuts, whatever that means, they still have their eggs, too.

Jenny