Photo A Day, Day 20: Egg

The first Easter that my husband and I were married, he dug out from the attic a big Rubbermaid tub of Easter decorations, which included a handful of dyed Easter eggs that he had made with his daughter over the years and carefully saved. A few have been broken in the intervening years, but I’m pretty certain that at least one or two in the collection are still from her childhood, over a decade ago.

And I have no doubt that in the coming years we will be adding more and more of the creations of our two younger children to the collection. This year, my 2-1/2 year old managed to participate for the first time, and did quite well at being gentle and not squashing the delicate shells nor spilling the dye all over the floor (well, not much, anyway). But my 4-1/2 year old really came into his own artistically this year.

Last year, as I recall, his most creative artistic endeavor was to dye an egg one color on one end and another color on the other end. Given his lack of patience at the time, the result was generally a white egg with a vaguely pink tint on one end and a vaguely green tint on the other. But one year has made all the difference. This year, he very patiently mixed colors to sponge-paint the eggs in just the right hue; he experimented with sponge-painting the eggs first, letting them dry, and then dying them in the “dipping” dye to fill in the blanks; he figured out how to hold the eggs carefully to avoid smudging his own artwork. In fact, he got a bit upset when he mishandled an egg and accidentally left a fingerprint.

But I will admit that this is my favorite egg from this year, specifically because of that fingerprint. Five, ten, twenty years from now (if the egg manages to survive that long), I will look at that small fingerprint and think of the small fingers that carefully made that egg, exploring, examining, experimenting. I will marvel at how much larger those fingers have grown and how much more they can do. I will delight that those fingers are still being used to create, to build, to explore. All that, just from one single egg.