an omen

I am not a superstitious person, although I do check my horoscope most mornings (just for a good laugh). But occasionally things happen that make me just want to read something into it. I remember driving to our new apartment many years ago to sign the lease, and seeing a huge rainbow breaking out over our road ahead. Surely, we thought, we have chosen the right place to live and we would be happy in our new home.

Then there are things so out of the ordinary as to give one pause to wonder, is this the twilight zone?!? One such thing happened recently while my mother and I were looking after my sister’s children. We knew that our last two days there would be our most challenging since it was the weekend and the children would be out of school. We woke that morning with heightened anxiety of what was in store for us. I suggested we start the day with fried eggs (a nice breakfast would give us a good energy boost). I cracked the first egg into the hot frying pan and was surprised it was a double yolk! I cracked the second egg and it, too, was a double yolk! Yes, we decided, this was an omen, the heavens were smiling on us and we were in for two very nice days with the children (after all, two yolks, two days, right?). I hard-boiled 5 more eggs for us to have in sandwiches at lunch and do you believe that when I opened each of those eggs, they were all with double yolks! We were totally amazed, what are the odds? I checked the carton to see if they were marketed as double yolks, but it wasn’t anywhere on the package. We were very sure it was an omen, then. And our two last days WERE very nice with the children.

I tried not to think about the possibility that the eggs came from chickens that had been fed some kind of hormones that in five years will be found to be dangerous to humans…