What hatches from an Easter egg? Looking through some old stories, I found a question I’d asked ten years ago in my Berkshires Week days. I asked it then as a marvel.
‘They appear this time of year in sparkling arrays, in all colors from cardinal to peacock. What fabulous bird or cousin to a platypus could emerge from shells like these? Brighter than a dragonfly, rarer than a luna moth, dancing messages more intricate than a bee’s to the lands beyond the lilac bush … How would you draw one?
‘Now there’s an exhibit I’d like to seeI Imagine the Lichtenstein or Gallery 51, BCC or WCMA filling a gallery with the answers. What would you see?’ And I’d still love to see the answers. Maybe the Guerilla Bunny will paint some ideas …
But I think now I’d ask another question along with that one. How many eggs are waiting to hatch right now, and forming within all kinds of mothers, and I’ve never seen them? I may never even have known they exist. Have you ever seen a dragonfly egg, or a wren’s, or a bubble of frogs’ eggs, or any kind of turtles’?
Hal Borland describes the shapes and colors of butterfly eggs, writing columns in the Connecticut Berkshires fifty years ago, and when I read them … I’d never even realized butterflies lay eggs. I wouldn’t know a cardinal’s egg if I saw one, or an eagle’s egg either. And I had never known that I didn’t know. Now … now that I know marvels live so close to me, I want to meet them.
Hatching out …
We have marvelous eggs within touch. The Guerilla Bunny, the anonymous artist known for giving away their works of art in spring, suggests keeping an eye on their social media for their next community treasure hunt …
An anonymous Berkshire artist, the Guerilla Bunny, paints bright and detailed eggs and hides them as community art projects. Press image courtesy of the artist.
The annual Baby Animals festival opens at Hancock Shaker Village this week with lambs and calves, kids and piglets — and chicks raised in local school classrooms. They’re newly hatched and coming to the Round Stone Barn this week. (Photo above by Susan Geller.)
Chicks look out at a new world from the safety of a yellow towel at Hancock Shaker Village.
And if you’re looking for ways to brighten eggs for the spring, we have some local sources — from simple Swiss patterns with onion skins and natural shapes to Slavic designs made with wax … (Creative Commons photo below by Andrea Pacheco.)
Eggs dyed with common kitchen ingredients show marbled patterns in red and blue and purple and gold. Creative Commons courtesy photo
