“Stay away from everything electrical,” she warned.
“What’s electrical?”
“You are, Charlie.”
My grandmother knew that many homes in the Appalachian Mountains are struck by lightning and are burned to the ground. Living at the top of the tallest ridge north of Virginia was peaceful, but at times inconvenient.
“I don’t even know if they can get a fire truck up the lane,” she once told me. “We have to be very careful with fires. Now stop playing with those matches.”
Because the storm was really brewing, grandma unplugged her toaster and an egg incubator that was on top of the television. She purchased the egg hatching hut with a lightbulb inside from the same garden catalog from which she ordered her blue potato tubers. The eggs were special ones, from ‘South African’ chickens, grandma explained. She showed me a map inside the Gurney’s catalog and before entering kindergarten I knew where Brazil was and where chickens that lay green eggs originate.
We placed the tiny eggs that were delivered to our house in a special carton under the warm bulb of the machine, hoping that we would have chickens with cut-off tails to add to the ones we already had on our farm.
“Come over here, I want you to see something.”
Thunder rocked our home.
“What makes that sound, grandma?”
“It’s God bowling in heaven,” she explained. “Do you see that? It’s coming out of its shell.”
A flash of lightning lit up the sky and the darkness of the trailer.
I rubbed my tongue in the space where I had lost my two front teeth as thunder rolled again.
I learned the nature of the heavens from my grandmother and those eggs–
The world is a giant incubator.
