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Writer's pictureAnnie Olson

Dried Egg Yolks (or Water the Universal Solvent)

After I had “my great vision” March 17th of 1993, I began to write essays of my life.


Dried Eggs Yolks is one of my favorites. Not because I like of what it’s all about. But because it is so revealing.

It involves the dried eggs yolks on the breakfast plates that are in the sink. Waiting for my return from a day at high school. My responsibility as an only child to take care of.


My folks loved sunny side up eggs every morning. Me? I preferred my yolks much more solid. Not a runny yellow.


In fact, as a little girl of 3 or four, I actually dumped my runny yellow eggs behind a kitchen cabinet (back then, a movable one with a curtain). My mom in another room.


I never asked my mom if she wondered how these dried egg yolks got behind the cabinet.


This is how much I hated runny eggs! And how insistent my mom was in forcing me to eat them! And my inability to speak aloud to my mom. What she needed to know.


So imagine me getting home, tired from all the people exposure at school. Stress of teachers. Bullies. Finding dried egg yolks I’ll need to scrap off. When all my mom needed to do was leave the plates in water. Enough to cover the not yet dried egg yolks.


But she was always busy with helping my grandma with her rooming houses. And busy with lots of yet unfinished building projects in our home.


She just didn’t realize ………. And I still was unable to speak aloud to my mom what she needed to know.


Today, 65 years later, at the kitchen sink washing our dishes……. This essay, that’s been surfacing often, finally couldn’t be ignored. “Write me down!”


So I’m sitting here with my iPad. Phil is napping on the couch. A Hulu movie, The Master, is on. No good. Snowing a bit outside. Phil’s electric heated throw keeping me warm. A bowl beside me. No more popcorn in it. 1:30 in the afternoon. We watched The Exemplar with friends last night. No one wanted popcorn. The Virus still active. Masks on.


Which reminds me of another essay I NEED to write. About a clay face mask John Denver painted for Hospice of Denver a few weeks before he was killed crashing his plane into Monterey Bay off the coast of California in October of 1997.


I’ve heard this statement many, many times. Because I love science. It has stayed with me. WATER, is an universal solvent!


So tears like, an universal solvent? Able to soften the dried grief in my soul?


“Water is called the universal solvent because it is capable of dissolving more substances than any other liquid……water molecules have a polar arrangement of oxygen and hydrogen atoms-one side (hydrogen) has a positive electrical charge and the other side (oxygen) has a negative charge.


We just put on St. Elsewhere. Listening to the music. And remembering the day Ron died. A Wednesday. “I need to get home and hear that music.” To drown out my pain. My grief.


So I realize that when it comes to egg yolks and grief, WATER re-hydrates what air has removed. Breaking the bond between plate and egg yolks. Doing the same with my grieving soul.


I didn’t know until October of 1987 that Grief, like dried egg yolks, was residing in my psyche. Created when I was little girl. Mind melding with a young Indian woman during her final minutes in this Shadow World. Ready to enter The Real World.


Softened by tears I thought would never stop. Allowing me finally to touch The Grief I’d fled from all my life.

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