A Tale of Two Dozen Eggs

With the son on a trip to a water park with his peers, the girls were asking me for an afternoon of outings, just us. You lucky devils, I said, we're going to have an agricultural sort of field trip. After lunch, we drove to my father-in-law's farm. Clarification: This isn't where Grandpa lives. When Michael was finishing up college, his father stopped resisting his urge to get back to the farm work he had grown up with. He bought a farm (without telling his wife - he bought her a tennis bracelet first) and now spends his days there, planting and tending crops, and sometimes raising livestock. However, while he grew MORE fond of the lifestyle of the farm as an adult, Michael's mother had also grown up on a farm, but was happy to have it behind her. The compromise is that FIL gets to have the farm, but MIL doesn't have to live there. FIL drives there every day as though to work, and rents out the farmhouse to a lucky family.

Grandpa raises all our beef. He's experimented with pork and poultry. But now he got himself a chicken house and provides all the eggs for the family and half of the people with whom he's ever shaken hands.


There are three roosters, but they get to strut about the farmyard while the ladies stay at home doing all the work. That's all I'm going to say about that.



Grandpa checked the coop for eggs first thing in the morning. We were there around noon and there were five more when Sophia and Ava looked. Usually Grandpa brings several cartons of eggs home to his home with Grandma and stores them in the fridge in their garage. We can help ourselves whenever we have a need for eggs, but there's something pretty nice about getting them from the farm. It's great to know where they come from and how fresh they are.