Eggs

Alice is trimming back an overgrown mock jasmine plant outside my sunroom window. It's grown too leggy and is pulling too hard on a powerline. In Spring, two doves often make a nest there. I've watched them guard the eggs, feed the young birds, and then watched the little ones fly away. Alice says it was not a good place for a nest since the Big Hunter Cat Nino could get up there. Once a nest did collapse there since the plant is so leggy. With the plant trimmed, hopefully if the dove couple does another nest there it will be in a stronger place.
At the beach house is a wax picture of a nest. Alice thinks of a book passage on eggs everytime she looks at that painting:".... the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs. If there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end....." F.H. Burnett, "The Secret Garden".