Easter is nearly upon us, and with that, many young ones will be looking for a bunny with a basket filled with the most perfect of foods–the egg. I am passionate about eggs and chickens.

When I was a little girl growing up in England during the war (WWII), I had a pet chicken named Lucy. I would take her for rides in a pram (baby carriage for you Americans). She’d look around in all directions from her captive spot, like a tourist, not wanting to miss anything. Perhaps, she welcomed the distraction from her most important task–to lay an egg.

Remarkably when we mention that another has laid an egg, we titter and snicker and think Thank God, Not I! Yet, a well-laid egg cannot be matched. Its shape, its flavor… My favorite breakfast is a soft-boiled egg, toast and tea.

There has arisen a recent urban craze to raise chickens for eggs. A chicken farmer is one food job that one cannot sleep through.

Here are a few words to live by when it comes to thinking about eggs–the very symbol of fertility.

“Love and eggs are best then they are fresh.” –Russian Proverb

“An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different.” — Oscar Wilde

“Eggs are very much like small boys. If you overheat them or over beat them, they will turn on you, and no amount of future love will right the wrong.”  — Anonymous.

A handwritten sign tacked to a tree announces: CORN, NEW LAID EGGS, STRAWBERRIES, and the driver’s foot eases off the pedal. The car slows as we scan the road ahead. And there it is — the roadside farm stand, that is as much a part of the rural landscape as the white-steepled church, standing calm and quiet on the fresh-cut lawn, and the blue-painted clapboard houses with the American flag moving softly in the summer morning breeze.

Around the rough, wooden lean-to, there are small family groups reaching for the just-picked fruits and vegetables. A wooden plank stretched between two sawhorses holds homemade jams and jellies and honey with their labels written in a spidery hand. There are mushrooms and berries; strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and on two or three days a year, red currants and gooseberries and raspberries as sweet as sugar and as intense as stained glass.  Fresh-baked breads and pies and cookies, gingerbread and muffins and scones are proudly arranged in doily-lined baskets, and at the end of the table are bunches of basil, parsley, thyme and sage, and jugs of newly pressed cider.

On the ground are bushels of baskets filled with apples and pears, plums and peaches, potatoes and onions, leeks and carrots, zucchini (always heaps of zucchini), burstlingly ripe, juicy tomatoes, and big and baby black eggplants. There are beets and lettuces, and shuddering green greens and brilliantly red radishes. On a side table are the eggs, brown and white, laid this very morning before the cock crowed.

The car is filled with more vegetables than we can eat in a month of dedicated consumption. But, we will worry about that later. Nostalgia drives us to buy too much. Temptation always overcomes reason.

The simple country farm stands are miniatures of the urban green markets that’s are springing up everywhere. These city markets are places where friends run into friends and pretty women wear straw hats and toddlers sleep in strollers while their parents amble from stand to stand. Here there are even more choices than in the country.

There are dairy stalls displaying fresh goat and cottage and artisanal cheeses. There are a dozen kinds of wholesome breads, dark and raisin-studded along with a scattering of onion wisps baked into the crust. There are trays of ‘good-for-you’ sprouts. The chickens are free-range, the ducks plump, and the little poussins come from local farms. Smoked meats, bacon and pork and venison sausages sell fast, as do the blush wines from the neighborhood vineyards.

And in the fall, there are a dozen kinds of apples, tiny squashes and pumpkins big as a bathtub.

Street musicians fill the air with the sound of fiddles, and little children shyly step forward to drop a coin in the hopeful hat.

Shoppers buy from their favorite farmers, whom they know by name. Warm hands receive the money and pass the fresh foods they have themselves nurtured, hand picked, and packed into trucks before the morning’s first light.

These markets are our continuing link with our real or imagined past.

Here, we feel renewed and refreshed, for there are few things that give greater pleasure than shopping at the market, carrying everything home, and transforming it into a beautiful lunch for friends, who will spend the rest of the afternoon with their elbows on the table, a glass on wine in hand. Blissfully satisfied.

Chronogram Magazine is a fascinating magazine. Its mission is to report on the arts, culture and spirit of the many upstate New York counties abutting the mighty Hudson River, namely Ulster, Dutchess, Greene, Columbia, Orange and Putnam counties.

It also champions the farmers of the Hudson Valley, who cultivate the the rich and fertile soil formed by glaciers aeons ago.

While some Valley residents grumbled about sitting in the dark without electricity or water for a couple of days in late August, it was the farmers who truly suffered the wrath of Hurricane Irene (and later, Lee’s') wrath.

The waters here have now receded to their former levels but the farmers are still suffering. The fruits and vegetables they grew and whispered to and nurtured from tiny seeds have drowned. Their once fertile fields have fallen silent and there are few outward signs of life.

To put this in stark terms, and to quote Brian K. Mahoney, editor of  Chronogram:

“Ulster County’s devastation was on par with a one-hundred-year meteorological event…Three thousand acres of vegetables were ruined in Ulster County alone. Taliaferro Farms in New Paltz lost 80 percent of its crop. At RSK Farm in Prattsville–the true ground zero of the flooding damage–not only was there total crop loss, but “Potato Bob” Kiley lost all his topsoil as well. The Schoharie Creek rose and swept it all away, leaving only the bedrock underneath.

For those of us who care about farms, the agricultural apocalypse visited upon the Hudson Valley and Catskills is a call to arms. Farms are not just a scenic addition to the landscape but an integral part of our communities–primarily as sources of locally grown food whose provenance we can be sure of, but also as a robust sector of economic activity…”

I have met some of these farmers in the many local farmers markets I visit from spring to late fall. I’ve munched their juicy apples and savored their baby greens, just-dug potatoes and newly harvested tomatoes and berries.

Simply because Irene has left, we still need to chip in,  clean up after and help the farmers who have fed us with their bounty. I urge you to visit Chronogram‘s Farm Aid page, to see how you can help the farmers buy the seed and soil and move on from this meteorological event.

This is the time to value the hard work and dedication of  farmers everywhere and contribute to co-ops wherever we live.