30 eggs a day ... keeps you busy

We didn't spend our entire trip to Metulla in the Canada Center. We ended up in a bed and breakfast (well, it was just a bed, there was no breakfast exactly) next to a chicken coop in the small village of Margoliyot, ten minutes south of Metulla, in the mountains on the Lebanese border.

For some people, sleeping next to a chicken coop would not have been good news and I thought I was one of those people. As it turns out, I am not. The first morning were were there, at the suggestion of the woman would owned the cabins, I took the kids when she went to collect eggs in the chicken coop.

Oh my goodness. What an epiphany I had when we arrived in the coop. Who knew I liked chickens? Not me. Who knew I liked collecting eggs on little cardboard egg platters? Not me. Who knew that I could collect those eggs for an easy hour without even noticing the time flying by? Not me. But I did.

What the hell is happening to me? I am not a farm girl. I don't like animals particularly. I don't like the rodents who like to live near animals one iota. I do not like to get up early and I am no fan of physical labour. That said, for some inexplicable reason, I love collecting eggs. And not just one or two platters worth, but 20 or 30 platters worth.

I also like mingling with the poor little chickens who are housed four per cage. And I got very adept at collecting the newly deposite, still-warm eggs from between the clawed feet of the cramped chickens without getting scratched.

I have never eaten such fresh eggs before and as my teacher and innkeeper, Shoshana, told me, most eggs in the grocery store are already a few weeks old by the time they get to the shelves. The eggs we had for breakfast that morning -- compliments of Shoshana for our hard work -- were still warm and only an hour past delivery. It reminded me of when I used to make my kids sit on the grass next to my vegetable garden in Toronto so I could feed them vegetables straight from the vine with all their nutrients still intact.

So now I have decided where I am going to retire in case you are looking for me. Of course, I am still going to need a beautiful condo on the beach in Herzliya (I haven't totally lost my mind). But in addition, I am going to summer in the mountains near Metulla where the air is less humid. And where the wind blows more frequently. And also where the enemy Hizbollah soldiers and their surveillance equipment are a mere few hundred meters away -- and apparently watching everything going on on the Israeli side, so you can never get lonely.

And if they are watching me and they think my life looks to good to be true, they might decide to infiltrate Israel's borders to get to my coop. And then, I will just have to sic my chickens on them.