Christine - Breaking Eggs - WoW

I just caught the recorded Session 4, which I couldn't attend 'in person' yesterday. I'm intrigued with 'Plant and Payoff', something I've never thought about in non-fiction. I think this wee story has them both? Would love your comments. (Yes, it IS fiction!) Will do the other exercises hopefully over the weekend which is really busy but will give me lots of opportunity to jot down observations.

Breaking eggs

Norma took the largest egg from the carton. It was huge. Fresh that morning from the egg farm.

She enjoyed this morning ritual ... her egg for breakfast. Just one, because she did everything in moderation. Two would be gluttony, she felt.

She placed the carton back in her fridge, contentedly viewing the neat, almost bare, shelves. Here were the makings for a couple of salads: romaine lettuce, a few radishes, some cucumber, a little goat cheese and half an avocado plus a small, boneless, skinless chicken breast for her supper. Nothing like the chaotic contents that destroyed her equilibrium when Charles had charge of the kitchen. He called himself a creative cook, but to Norma that simply meant using too many dishes and far too many ingredients for a meal which, frankly, she could have done without. And the waste! Always half-finished packets to be thrown away. It was the same in the garage ... clutter. He rarely threw anything out. There were tools that he’d had for decades and hardly ever used. Some had belonged to his grandfather for goodness sakes. And his closet was full of “favourite” wool-pilled sweaters and old cord pants that had seen better days.

Well, now they were all gone. His closet, like the cupboard in Old Mother Hubbard’s kitchen, was bare. The garage was pristine too, home to the minimum of necessities to keep the yard and the driveway impeccable, and to Norma’s new electric car – a sensible buy she thought; so economical and quite affordable given the generous trade-in on Charles’ rackety old vintage Cadillac.

She patted her carefully coiffed hair in appreciation of her surroundings.

She broke the egg into a frypan. A double yolk. Drat, that would ruin her regimen. But she’d eat them anyway. No sense in trying to separate one yolk and waste the other.

Her mind involuntarily conjured an image of what might have been ... two adorable fluffy yellow chicks, peeping and chirping. She dismissed the thought immediately. Sentimentality had no place in her life.

She glanced at the urn on the windowsill.

“You were sentimental, weren’t you Charles? And look where it got you!”

Too sentimental, even, to complain that his favorite mushroom omelettes tasted a bit different over his last few weeks. Too sentimental because he was so touched that Norma was putting on a caring face, cooking him breakfast each morning. And not only that, she was even foraging the mushrooms herself, in that little copse behind the house. Who could tell which were poisonous and which were not?

“Yes, you did love your mushrooms, didn’t you Charles,” she smiled seraphically.

She had foraged exactly the amount she needed. Too much would have been gluttony. ###