Under October’s canopy of rusty, “sun-winking leaves,”
I begin to doze off to the wheezing snores of my dog beneath
The chair, both of us shifting arthritic bones in our search of some relief.
Leaning back & closing my eyes once more, I discover what must’ve been
That same worn satisfaction I remember seeing in many old folks years
Ago as they rocked on front porch swings & basked in whatever sun
Could be soaked in. Oddly enough. I’m recalling now that sizzle & spit
Of bacon strips in the frypan years ago on the farm, accompanied by the plop
And splatter of fresh farm eggs just in from the hen house. Certainly,
Those weren’t the same store eggs that were this morning’s fare, those pale
And far too anemic excuses that probably sat for days in a back cooler
Of the local Fairway Supermarket. Excuse me for a moment since
I’m traveling back many decades now as older folks are wanting to do, re-
Calling those straight-from-the-coop eggs we had on cool autumn mornings
Like this one’s turning out to be, mornings when our half-year-old layers
Were all flush with eggs warm & content beneath their brown-feathered
Bottoms. But whatever eggs we filched from the hens back then came
Only after a minor fuss-up of squawking & wing-flapping protests,
A dozen or more eggs or as many as we fancied for breakfast that day
Since high levels of cholesterol hadn’t, for us, raised any major alarm bells
No one voicing yet any such concern from the morning’s radio broadcast.
Our youngest cradled a cache of eggs back into the farmhouse in an old
Dented tin pan, the eggs arriving in several shades of brownish tinges
Since our hens happened to be an exotic & fanciful, American mix, three
Or more generations removed from their pure-blood, mail-order ancestors,
Rhode Island Reds & Leghorns that arrived before those hens among them
Had been improperly seasoned by our two spur-sparing & feisty bantam
Roosters we delighted in naming Romeo & Tybalt. Thereby, our eggs
Turned out in a spectrum of tones from milk-coffee brown to milk
Chocolate, glorious American eggs that provided for any hunger our three
Children, wide-eyed & waiting at the table, might have. Scrambled eggs!
Yes, we were rich beyond measure back then, not giving a good gosh darn
How our beat-up, blue-toned VW Bug sitting in the corncrib might be in
Desperate need of another spare part or how those overdue bills had noses
To the ground, sniffing, homing in on our rural mailbox stationed on a gravel-
Top road waiting for a post. No, if there was any truth to be had in the radio
Bulletins back then, we did our very best to keep our minds glued to the good
Lives we had with those scrambled eggs plated & a morning opening over
The harvested fields with each of us eager for another glorious day dawning!
Terry Savoie
Terry Savoie’s poems have been in more than 400 literary journals both domestically and abroad over the past four decades. These include APR, Portage, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Sonora Review, North American Review, Commonweal, and The Iowa Review as well as America, Tar River Poetry, and Cumberland River Review.
Portage Magazine 