Egg Wars

As Easter approaches this weekend, I am reminded about a lot of things from my childhood related to Easter.  One of those fond memories includes “Egg Wars”.

I’m not sure how it began, but based on the game as well as the participants, I am pretty sure that my brother Neal made this whole thing up and then Keith and I took over when he went off to college.   Here’s how it works…..after the Easter Egg hunt at your house, you pick your best egg and get a partner who has their own eggs.  Your partner and you tap the rounded end of the eggs together.  Who’s ever egg cracks first is the loser and the winner gets to keep the other guy’s egg.   The goal is to get all the eggs.  Keith and I were vicious about winning this game.  We usually played against Lynn and Patrick Rouse as well as Lisa Weil.  Maybe some of the Tricarrico’s would come by or we would go to their house with our egg baskets.

The act of decorating the eggs each year was with the express intent of creating the strongest egg to be the ultimate winner of the contest.  I distinctly remember when a new kind of egg coloring came out.  It made a “swirly” decoration (still found on store shelves to this day) on the eggs and truly made a stronger shell…almost like it had a small amount of shellac in the color.   Over the years, we became masters at the art creating the strongest eggs in order to steal all the neighbors eggs and then challenged each other to the war to end all wars of egg wars.  The winner gets………………….egg salad?   I happen to LOVE egg salad.

One year as we went egg hunting we could not find one of the eggs.  We had counted how many we decorated.  We were always equal…he did 9, then I did 9 or he did 12 and I did 12.  We did that so when we went egg hunting we would end up with an equal number (yes, all siblings have that “its not fair” gene).   This particular year, we just couldn’t find that one last egg.  We became so disoriented at the loss of one egg, I don’t even remember what happened with Egg Wars with the Rouses, but I suspect we lost.

Fast forward to summer.  July to be exact.  My parents are down the street at either the Rouses or the Weil’s and I am sure the Tricarrico’s and Siefert’s were there and they were all having a great time.  In the meanwhile, Keith and I are home alone, middle school kids, searching the house for a cookie.  Some sort of sweet.  We had checked everywhere and were ready to give up when we decided to check the one place you would think there would be cookies, but my mom never hid them there…………the cookie jar.  On the hutch in the dining room, we had this green ceramic cookie jar decorated with grapes that we never put cookies into, but it was the one place we hadn’t checked yet.

Keith opens the cookie jar and says “Willard, you are never going to guess what’s in here.”  “Cookies?” I ask.  “I found the egg”, he says.  it took me a minute, but I figured out what egg he was talking about.  The missing egg from Easter.

Interestingly, the egg was still in tact.  it has been at least 3 months, perhaps 4.  It was probably that shellac that was holding it together.  We knew it would be nasty when it broke.  We were extra careful to take the whole cookie jar out to the front porch.  Keith picked it up and we decided to see if he could get it out to the street from the front porch.  At the end of our driveway was a street light, so we knew we would see where it hit.  “Go for it”, I said……Keith drew back and let it go.  It hit exactly in the center of the road in front of our house.  When it broke you could see the steam rise in the light from the street light…..then the smell followed.

We ran into the house, slammed the door and waited for Old Lady Hanson to call the police as she usually did when she thought we were doing something we shouldn’t (which was a lot of the time).  She never did, but we did end up having to fess up to our parents the next day when they asked who threw the stinky egg into the street.  They could still smell it when they came home from down the street.  In fact, the smell lingered for at least a week.

Egg Wars continued for a few years after that, but were never as memorable as the year that the egg went missing and showed up in the cookie jar.

There’s still have time…….go start your own Egg Wars.