I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I don’t like farm-fresh eggs. I grew up on them (we had chickens - I’ve been permanently scarred by the smell of boiling feathers and the spraying blood from a chicken whose head has just been cut off, and yes, they really do run around if you don’t have them tied up by their feet). But my mom and sisters and grandma used to get new chickens - peepies - every year, just to get the fresh eggs and then slaughter the chickens, each woman or girl holding firmly taut lips in the “mom face” and taut chicken skin to pull out wet feathers.

I used to “hunt” the eggs for my grandma, wipe them clean once back in the house and nestle them in her old strawberry baskets. Every morning I’d say, “Grandma, can I go hunt the eggs?”
“Sorry, Peapicker, I already did it.” Or, “Go ahead, I left them there for you” or “No, it’s your brother’s turn.”

Hunting the eggs was never as fun at my house…. the chicken poop was ranker than at Grandma’s, and it was dustier, wormier, with many-legged bugs that seemed to come from the Earth’s core squirming under the wood planks walking up to the door. Disgusting.

Anyway, someone at work brings fresh eggs to whoever wants to buy them every Monday. I got some the second week. But the yolks won’t crack right - the shell won’t split over the membrane part - it hangs on for dear life and you have to tip the shell carefully so the yolk won’t break, and then bits of the shell finally let go and fall right into the skillet or the bowl or hot water. And those egg whites seem to hold the shell bits more firmly than store bought - you can’t just get them out with a fingertip dab - it takes a scrape.

Hmmm.

My grandma was a farm-fresh egg. But I loved her.
Let me rethink this.