Easter Egg Hands

With six days to go, and a delivery of duplicate supplies scheduled for tomorrow, I have, for the first time in my life, failed to make Easter eggs. Perhaps I should say, I have failed to realize my vision for this year’s eggs. Ironically, this is also the first time I have really planned ahead. This was to have been the year of indigo eggs. As early as last summer, I planted Japanese indigo, whose leaves when crushed produce the dye that has become the name of that wonderful, perfectly mid-shade blue we see in so many South Asian fabrics. When the plants died back in this winter’s unusual-until-climate-change hard freeze, I hovered anxiously above the little patch of ground by the front steps, scanning for nondescript leaves and unremarkable small white flowers. It was only last week that I became confident that I would have a crop of leaves big enough to fill my blender jar.

Yesterday, Palm Sunday by the Christian calendar, was my annual Easter Egg Making day with my friend Thad and my older son, Ross. Thad has long been perfecting deep red eggs; there have been years when she has been deeply disappointed in the shades of that color she has managed to produce. They always look good to me, but she has a very particular color in mind: no hint of orange, no blush of pink. The red she wants has eluded dyes and even language: not crimson, it seems; not burgundy, not maroon, but just red. It wasn’t until I saw this year’s batch arranged neatly in their cartons, that I had a sense of what she is after. Her eggs glowed from across the room even before their olive oil bath.

Ross is understandably confident on Egg Day. Our most creative egg maker, he has a freedom of hand and vision that can produce outside-the-box (carton?) results. His has spectacular failures and spectacular successes—his motto, Few Great Eggs. I, on the other hand, have until now been something of machine, producing eggs to a theme and filling cartons with what in the academy we have learned to call “deliverables.” For most of my egg-making years, I made highly colored and layered eggs with wax designs. Drawing on white eggs with white crayons, is a little bit like being a Victorian seamstress making mourning attire with black thread. My designs, then, have tended to the folksy, with misshapen flowers and geometrics. It is only this year, when Ross bought a pysanky kit, that I realized I should have been drawing in black wax and melting it off.

More recently, for the last two years, I have settled on another theme: eggs that look something like those produced by birds. Although I have used pictures of real birds’ eggs for reference, I have been a little free with color and design, rolling my eggs in painted rice to produce speckling that would not convince, say, a red-vested bobul looking for a a long-lost embryo child, but which look very nice on the table in a nest-like basket.

Together the three of us—Thad, Ross, and myself—have also experimented with the dyes themselves: food coloring, gels, packaged Easter dyes, packages natural dyes from whole foods, dyes we made ourselves from vegetable, herbs, and spices. Gels, it turns out, produce exceptionally vibrant colors, while herbs and spices can be iffy. Beets, which work so well on peeled—and pink—Pennsylvania Dutch pickled eggs, have surprisingly little effect on eggshells. Tumeric does dye eggs if you are very patient, but it also, as my napkins can attest after an Indian meal, permanently stains your linens. Almost everything dyes your hands and fingernails, but each year I note the resilience of the human body as hands come clean after a few days of bathing. In a nod to Easter embodiment, skin is reborn every year.

My egg plan this year was both simple and labor intensive. I would eschew patterns in favor of color, grow some indigo plants and experiment with different blues. I ordered my plants some eight months before Easter and watched them spread all summer. As the online description admitted, these were not beautiful plants, but slightly scraggly things with tiny, stumpy flowers. Although I sowed doubt with the indigo, I was compelled by pictures I saw online of eggs in various shades of blue and turquoise-even the color I claim as my own and collect all around me in clothes, linens, and dishes: that exact mid-point of blue and green that I think of as “aqua” or perhaps “Mediterranean.”

I followed with great care the online process for “indigo eggs,” harvesting the leaves and blending them in ice water. Given the somewhat characterless attributes of indigo, I was a little worried about identifying the correct plant and especially about including weeds—of which there are many in my garden—into the mix. Before carting my 60 white eggs to Thad’s house and to the scene of this year’s egg making, I performed a test on one cooked egg. It came out of the blended and stained liquid covered in green slime, which was on the face of it, not terribly encouraging. One quick wipe with a paper towel, though, revealed an egg of a lovely pale but by no means pallid shade of blue, with just the touch of green that makes it my color. The color was just the right degree of uneven to signal “natural”—there were touches of deeper color, even an inexplicable but charming band of white that reminded me of those lucky people with a perfect—and inimitable— stripe of silver hair. I was eager to try playing with the immersion times, perhaps even using some back-up indigo powder as a form of paint to produce blue on blue.

Something happened on the way to the egg making. First, I lost my back-up indigo, although I consoled myself I did not need a safety net since my one egg was so perfect. Then, mysteriously, all my other eggs refused to take on any color. Slime, yes, but no aqua, turquoise, celadon, sky blue—no indigo. I gave up and borrowed Ross’s pysanky wand, which was fun to use, but extremely humbling, especially for someone who has inherited from the maternal side of the family a slight hand tremor. In any case, I did not have the heart for my usually folksy designs that were the only possibly for a pysanky artist with quivering hands.

It is an indictment of my character (I cannot write the word “indictment” this week without thinking of Donald Trump and how his supporter compared his legal blight to Jesus’s this Easter week) that I could not just let things go. I had to make eggs. On the Saturday before Easter, I decided that I would use packaged dyes to produce a bunch of eggs in shades of my color. I pulled out the kettle, the little dying cups, and the vinegar, and started dunking eggs in blue, green, yellow, and even pink. As the eggs came out, each a slightly different tint, I reveled in the color that never fails to make me happy. There was no naming the shades that came out, because they were all so similar they belied any attempt at distinction. They were not so much eggs as colors, not so much colors as shades.

My hands, of course, retain the trace of all my efforts at egg dying. Because I tried so many different approaches, and attempted so many times to make something that worked, my nails and fingers become a sort of palimpsest of ideas, failures, and of course attempts to scrub my skin clean. For a secular person, I have been thinking a lot about hands, and marks, and calendars. Soon it will be time to get rid of the not-so-indigo eggs; because I do not blow out the shells, they will tell me when it is time to get rid of them and to start planning for next time.

Easter Egg Hands

Ignorance

Kitchen Mess