Peter Joseph, a familiar name in Waterville’s Lebanese community, loved telling stories about serving as an infantry man with Patton’s Third Army outside of Bastogne in the really cold winter of the Belgian Ardennes. Look it up, and learn what it was like to sleep and maybe die in the snow.

Peter said, “the old women would hide eggs from the Germans, and give them to us as we passed through their villages so we could cook them over a fire in our helmets.”

What would Peter, were he alive today, think of his Waterville world empty of the common egg?

Maine 2025: Every morning I start my coffee and slip two extra-large brown eggs into a pot of boiling water and count the minutes (five) that will give me the perfect texture and color.

We’re talking now about the joy of seeing hunks of white egg with small pockets of brilliant yellow peeking through the sprinkles of salt and pepper.

I make the sign of the cross as my mother did when she cooked, and thank the Lord of the universe for these two eggs that I can still eat.

My life, and surely maybe yours, is full of egg stories that we’ve forgotten until a word or a smell like Easter brings back the memory of coloring eggs (purple, red, green, yellow) and writing our names on them. Gonna cry now.

You remember Sister Amelda, the ancient nun who we swore was at the Last Supper. Until she passed away in her 90s, she was the Patton in command of the convent yard.

Sister spent her days potting plants in her old greenhouse during years of war and peace, and she raised chickens.

Chickens, we’re taught, came to us from European explorers and enslaved Africans, and became a cheap staple of the American diet just as they are now. The slaves kept the yards and tables of their masters clean and tended the chickens that provided their morning supply of eggs.

This little Irish boy and his sister, from across the street, collected the eggs each summer morning. On summer afternoons, the sister would let her chickens walk across the street to grace our table with the, yes, EGGS.

So it was with the so-called “grassroots” monks who lived down the street from my rented house in the shadow of Fuji in the early ’50s, only five years after the war.

The monks, who raised vegetables and kept chickens, and gave the eggs to the old survivors of the bombs and fires, were friendly to this “Gaijin” who learned to speak their language so he could shop in the village shops.

So here we are in the troubled years, threading our way among the shoppers who are combing the markets for cheaper eggs, and upon finding them, and despite their inflated prices, fill their baskets as if they were dime store jewels that will stay fresh for years.

So here we are, you and I, aging fans of Jack Armstrong and Dick Tracy, who were glued to our living room radios and black and white movies. In the morning we chose, instead of our parents eggs, bowls of Wheaties and Rice Krispies and on winter mornings oatmeal.

We grew to see grandparent scavengers prowling the grocery store looking for eggs? Eggs for crying out loud?

It’s time for dinner. Guess what I’m gonna have. A six-egg omelette du fromage.

P.S. Easter is coming … you know what that means … no, not chocolate bunnies.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.