Easter and the Unfound Egg

Between the Easter dinner main course and the concluding and much appreciated multitude of desserts course, the older kids hide Easter eggs for the younger kids to find. This has always been the kids' idea, and the older ones spend a good deal of time secretly plotting the perfect in-plain-sight hiding places. At the end, they always solemnly swear that all the eggs have been found and accounted for.

A few years ago, in the dark and cold of winter, I found an old Easter egg down amongst the bath towels; a subsequent year I went to pour coffee into a mug and only to spot pinkish, quite well preserved, pink fossil egg bits lurking. A few days ago my eye fell on a spotted specimen, clearly not left over from this year's hunt, nestled on top of some texts in the computer room. Curiously, these forgotten eggs have never advertised themselves with the signature rotten egg smell, known to chemists as hydrogen sulfide. [In the department of miscellaneous information, hydrogen sulfide is more toxic than carbon monoxide, but it isn't the stealth killer that carbon monoxide is because of its stench.]

Meanwhile, I have left the spotted egg in place, to see if anyone else finds it and wants to put it in their Easter basket. Dover probably would be quite eager to lay claim to it, but it is on a top shelf, above his sniffing level.