Each evening, I had chores to do. One of my chores was to go into the chicken coop and gather the eggs.   There were wooden boxes, filled with straw, built along two walls of the coop.  The hens laid their eggs in the boxes.

No matter how carefully and quietly I opened the chicken coop door, the chickens cackled and flew around and stirred up dust.

Chickens are real scaredy birds!

I held my breath, because it was hard to breathe with the dust.  To get the eggs, I had to reach my hand into each box, pull out the eggs and carefully put them into a pail.  I was glad if the nest didn't have a chicken on it. It was much easier to get the eggs from an empty nest.

Sometimes the hens were what Momma called "broody hens".  I think that meant they had a bad attitude because if I reached in under them to get their eggs, they would peck my hands and wrists.

Then I'd run out of the chicken coop, crying and yelling.  Daddy would come out of the milking barn, go into the coop and drag those hens off the nests and pull the eggs out for me.

He explained in a stern voice. "I've told you before.  All you have to do is pull the hens off the nest to get the eggs."

Well, try as I might, I never could get passed their pecking to get them off the nest and it seemed very night, Daddy had to come and help me.

I tried just gathering the eggs from the empty nests. Daddy found out and told me I had to gather ALL the eggs EVERY DAY or they would spoil and get rotten and wouldn't be any good.

One time I tried to pry the hens off the nests with a big stick.  They squawked and screeched and Daddy must have heard them because he came into the coop to see what was going on.

Daddy made a grouchy face and said, "Don't do that again. You might hurt the chicken or break the eggs under her."   Then he took my stick and threw it over the fence, out into the field.

When I was finally done getting all the eggs, I took them down into the basement of the house.  The basement was dug out of the earth.  It had dirt walls and a dirt floor and was very cool so the eggs stayed cool and fresh and didn't spoil.

I washed the eggs off with warm water and a clean, soft cloth and put them into a cardboard box.   The box had soft cardboard trays with pockets for each egg to sit in.  When the box was full, it held fifteen dozen eggs.

The egg man came every Saturday morning in a truck and took the box of eggs I had gathered and cleaned.   He gave Momma some money for them and took them to the city to sell in the grocery store.   Momma gave me a quarter every Saturday for doing my chores.