Hard boiled eggs....

yes there it is.. butterfly's have become the one way I will continue to reprsent the fact that I carry my grandmother with me every day.. hence grabbing any t-shirt, pocketbook, pin, accessory that has butterflies strewn on them.. even if the butterfly itself is ugly.. it doesn't matter. It's what it represents for me. I hate needles but one day I do plan on getting a tattoo so there is not one day that I don't leave my memory of my grandmother behind. I always want a thought of her not a second away from me. As I type I look down at my hands and they remind me of my grandmother telling me all the time that when she was young she had the same hands as mine.. how beautiful they were, and how everyone always told her how beautiful they were. Mine were until a fight with an abusive ex-boyfriend and now my right hand pinkie is croocked.. so much for hand modeling.. but that makes me feel that one day I will live the life that she lived. She moved in with us when I was 10, shortly after we moved to our new house in Arlington Hts. My parents had an extra master suite built on the first floor so she could have her privacy and still live with us. As soon as she moved in, she had just retired, and she slowed down fast.. once walking to work, the grocery store, the local restaurants, to get her hair done, to go painting ceramics, now she sat in her chair and the kitchen table and so a ritual begun. Every day I got home from school.. some days a neighbor would come home with me to study or watch tv or read together.. whatever we did they always went home around 4:30ish and I went into the kitchen to see what Grandma had started for dinner. My grandmother was one of 11 brothers and sisters, raised on a farm in a small town in Iowa. The woman could cook any American meal that you could name off the top of your head and she could come up with the best recipes for anything.. even leftovers had their own things that one could make them into to renew their splendor.. I could never tell for sure if they tasted better as leftovers or not. Either way, most meals had their own homemade gravy and potatoes were a staple. My best memories are of hard boiled eggs... wheather we were making deviled eggs for a party, egg salad sandwiches, or just regular ol hard boiled eggs I was always facinated watching my grandmothers frail thin crippled hands work their way around a hard boiled egg.. she had the patience of a saint for each egg and they always came out perfect.. she had all these tricks on how to cool them, just where to strike them, and she always told the story of watching her mother just run them under water and the shells would just fall away practically on their own.. she never learned to do that. I on the other hand have no patience and mine look as though a dog tried to eat the egg before I cut it up for a salad or deviled eggs. Now here and again I'll be in my kitchen and I'll grab the salt out of the cabinet to salt the water for pasta or I'll grab a seasoning out of the cabinet and as I reach to do so it's almost as she is sitting behind me directing me on which spice to grab, or telling me to turn the heat up or down, or telling me it's time to start the vegetables so they'll be done at the same time as the meat. The hardest time for me is being in the kitchen on days when I made hard boiled eggs.. for whatever reason it's something that has become very personal to me sometimes I'll even only do it when I know I can be alone so I can think about taking my time to make sure that those shells come off perfectly and I really get mad at myself when I try to hurry and they turn out all peckled.. ahh so the next time you have my infamous 7 layer salad or deviled eggs or see Easter eggs at my home you'll know that I took my time, blood, sweat, and tears, making those perfect.