18,000 chickens.  

The average chicken lays one egg per day. 

That’s 6,570,000 eggs per year. 

That’s a lot of fucking eggs.

When I was about 10 years old, I started working on the farm, collecting eggs to be delivered to grocery stores. Some call this child labor. I call it learning work ethic, and being a farmer.  It was rare that a kid on the farm wasn’t working for pay in those times; in fact, some families in the area had large families as they were literally creating workers for their farms.

And so began my early childhood career of collecting eggs. We had 4 different barns. The chickens were in cages over a giant pit in the ground, and every year, a man would come with a D10 Caterpillar and clean out the shit from under the cages. That shit would then be spread all over our fields, as it is some of the best fertilizer money can buy. But at that time of the year, the Van Arnam family wasn’t popular in the community. I’m sure you can imagine the stench.

Each of our barns had conveyor belts and the cages were angled toward those belts. This way, when the chickens laid eggs, the egg would roll onto the conveyor belt. We had tables at the front of the barn that rolled the conveyor belt through, thus bringing the eggs to one location. My job was to stand in front of that table and collect the eggs.

When I first began picking eggs, I had small hands and wasn’t very adept.

But as we so often say, practice makes perfect, and when a girl gets bored, she gets creative. If you look at an egg, you can see that one end is slightly more pointed than the other. It was my job to make sure that all the eggs were stacked with the pointier end facing down. I started by gathering one egg at a time, and then gradually got to the point where I could pick up two eggs in each hand, turn them around and place them in the container without having to think about it.

By the time I was 13 years old, I was a pro. It was my after-school job to do the 4 PM collection, and I was the fastest on the farm. At this point, I could now pick up three eggs in each hand, simultaneously, and place them in their containers. I would often have four of the tables going at once and would jump from table to table, gathering six eggs at a time.  

This all happened in the 90s, so it wouldn’t be right to leave out my aspiring singing career here, too. 

I had a walkman, and then, of course, a Discman when they became the rage.  I learned to sing songs like ‘Listen to Your Heart’ by Roxette, and ‘I Saw the Sign’ by Ace of Base. Being alone in the barns gave me the opportunity to hone my singing skills. This girl had big dreams. 

Alas, singing was not to be my future career. But the lessons learned in those barns, singing and slinging eggs will never be forgotten. I learned that in order to make money, one had to work hard. I learned work ethic and manual labor. I found my voice in those barns, even though it would be years before I actually put it to good use. 

The lessons and values learned in those barns would carry me through years of poor decisions and bad habits. If it weren’t for what I learned as the fastest egg picker in the West, I’m not sure I’d be alive today.