At the risk of jinxing myself, I’m going to step out onto a budding limb and declare spring has arrived to Central Virginia. As in any typical transition from winter, we have experienced some extreme weather changes. One day the temperature is close to 80 degrees and the next we have snow flurries. It’s difficult to what to wear and what to eat.
When the weather warms, just was I dress lighter, I also want to eat that way. And just like eating turkey at Thanksgiving or stollen on Christmas morning, there are a few certain foods that I like to eat when the first whiff of clean, sweet spring air hits my nose. One of these is egg salad sandwiches. Even though hard boiled eggs go hand in hand with the celebration of the Easter Season, my connection to egg salad begins years ago with my friend, Terrie.
I met Terrie soon after I was hired for my first job out of college as a “management trainee” for Agway Gardens September of 1977. Her husband Bruce was my first boss. I don’t know why we hit it off, we had little in common except for being the oldest child of large Catholic families, but we did in a big way.
In the four years I lived in Syracuse, Terrie and I were as close as sisters. She kept me grounded those first few years I was on my own. She and her husband were my base family unit providing me with a landing spot when I was lonely and lots of meals. For my part, I would occasionally babysit their toddler, Danny. After Dave finished grad school, the four of us were together most weekends playing pinocle into the wee hours with Bruce Springsteen blasting in the background.
Living in Syracuse, winters are long; much longer than even the longest seeming winters here in Virginia. To keep the cold air from blowing through the cracks in the windows in my apartment, I taped plastic over them at the end of October and didn’t dare take it off all of them until mid May. So, when the first break in the weather came and the snow yielded to greening grass, it was something to celebrate.
After so many years, linear memory is almost impossible but I have a vivid memory of one of those warm days when Terrie made egg salad sandwiches for us. With her kitchen windows open, curtains dancing as the clean spring air cleared out the stuffiness of winter, she proclaimed egg salad a rite of passage from winter to spring. Until then, I never really gave egg salad much consideration either way.
But the memory of that warm spring day so many years left such an impression on me that now, when the first warm day arrives promising the coming of spring, I make egg salad and remember my friend Terrie and the time we shared so very long ago.