Last night we watched “Anne of Green Gables” – the ‘must see’ delightful television movie, always shown around Christmas time. The scene of Marilla taking Anne (with an ‘e’!) into the chicken pen to collect the eggs, put a big grin on my face. Anne hesitated to touch the freshly laid but slightly dirty eggs with even little feathers on them. Why did this scene remind me of a recent visit with my friend Jane?

Let me tell you. We were traversing the ups and downs in a park along the ocean shore. Our conversation, the way it’s always among women, covered a lot of problems, from global warming to gardening, composting, and, from there, quite naturally to reducing our ecological footprint. Jane reminisced about her experiences while in Germany. She had been posted close to Baden Baden with the Canadian army.

“Giselle, believe it or not, it was 1971 and the Germans were sorting their garbage already then! I had been allowed to rent a small apartment in a house and did not have to stay in the barracks. The landlady showed me where to put my garbage in the basement, sorted by glass, metal, and paper. The rest I was to leave in the bag and just put it next to the container. For some reason, I had to ring her doorbell one day. I was shocked when I saw my garbage bags in her entrance hall. She was in the process of sorting through it. It had been the “time of the month” for me and you can’t imagine how embarrassed I felt for some of my garbage contents. She was quite nonchalant about it. She explained her brother had pigs and there is a lot of stuff in the garbage that can be added to their feed. A few days later she gave me a little package of pork meat…”

I told Jane of my upbringing on a small country farm. I can’t remember if we ever had any garbage that wasn’t used for something. My mother had a basket for shopping, small bags made out of old pillow cases for sugar, flour, salt with those names stitched onto them. Most of all the other food grew in our gardens or fields. We had a horse, a few cows, pigs, geese, ducks, chickens and my father had quite a number of pigeons. Jane continued her story, almost unbelievable for me, the country girl.

“Oh my God, Giselle, I can’t believe I have to tell you this. With a proud gesture, my landlady handed me a brown bag with half a dozen eggs in it. This was quite a gift! When I looked at them in my kitchen, my stomach turned. There were little feathers on them and some spots of chicken sh#t. No way would I eat those eggs! How could I dispose of them? I didn’t even want to touch them. I couldn’t put them in my garbage because she would find them. The thought of washing them never even occurred to me. But never mind, I found a way. I jumped into my car and drove to a rest stop on the autobahn. The garbage cans were often quite full. I stopped next to one and put the bag with the eggs in it and drove away, relieved. It didn’t take long and there was a siren howling behind me. My goodness, ‘Polizei!’ I quickly checked my speedometer but I was well under the speed limit. I didn’t feel guilty at all and kept on driving. My thought was he surely must mean someone else…The police car sidled up to me and the officer waved me to the side to stop. When he approached me, he made a motion for me to roll my window down, which I obligingly did. He handed me the brown bag with my eggs and said sternly:

“Those garbage cans are for people resting and eating at the rest stop. The garbage cans are for them and not for people to drop off their garbage.”

Even now, with a lost expression, Jane said, “He didn’t give me a ticket when he realized I did not speak German. Apparently, he hadn’t even looked into the bag. For me, it was an embarrassing moment and terrible to have those eggs back. Now what? Then it came to me. I had to go to a meeting, held in a rather large hall. I took the eggs into the restroom there, cracked them over the toilet and flushed them down. I also crushed the egg shells and they followed the egg yolks. Aaah, problem solved.”

I looked at Jane and was wondering – but before I could even ask, she explained,

“Giselle, I was twenty-five years old. I was born and raised in a city and had never seen a chicken or knew or even thought about where the eggs we bought and ate came from…”

Watching ‘Anne of Green Gables’, who was only eleven years old but apparently felt the same way my friend Jane felt, it occurred to me that there might still be lots of city folks who have no idea of what they eat or where it came from. But then – with the enlightening of the 20^th and 21^st century social media, television, picture books and Farmer’s Markets it’s hard to imagine that children only see the headless chicken carcass wrapped in clear plastic on the supermarket shelves. Seeing those it’s hard to imagine that they were once the creatures responsible for the existence of the eggs down the aisle, neatly and cleanly packaged in recyclable soft cardboard cartons.