On Sundays in spring when a cheerful breeze can be felt bringing the sun’s warmth for an all-day stay to my country hideout, gratitude begins with breakfast. There are two of us up early and ready to get to work fussing over our little estate and our charmed lives. But first, we want something to eat.

The breakfast should be hearty enough to sustain us only through the morning’s work, because we don’t want to miss out on feeling hungry for a good lunch.

I set the table with spring flowers received from a friend and a small jar of Maine blueberry jam. (Meant to hold us over until I make fresh jams again when the strawberries bloom. And the blueberries, raspberries, peaches, and pears.) A stoneware pitcher contains stirred-up orange, pineapple, and strawberry juices.

There is always a candle on the breakfast table, too. On this particular Sunday, a day when our breakfast conversation will be about planning a trip to France, the candlelight shines dreams of fairy tale escapes to small villages in the French countryside, where I am inside a stone church, because we have gone for a walk to find fresh bread, but have come upon a church on the way. The church is deserted, filled only with sunlight and the musk of centuries of fervent desires, damp, absorbed by the stone. No prayer is ever wasted.

The same friend bearing the bouquet of spring flowers, which smelled heavenly because of some sweet Hyacinth, delivered a collection of perfect eggs from her hens, in an egg carton she decorated just for me. The eggs will be the main course for our modern Sunday breakfast.

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These flowers and eggs were all part of a birthday gift to me and I immediately thought back to a day at the end of last summer when I sat with my friend on her grand back porch and watched the hens running around in her gardens, free as love at age 14, hiding, causing us to worry about them, then showing up again without any concern for our worries. We drove around my friend’s country estate on a garden tractor together—I was at the wheel (for my friend had a broken leg)—visiting all her gardens and stopping to admire a lush patch of beautiful gourds rambling, (free as love over age 55!), through her pig pen. She’d had some pigs, but they had gone to slaughter. I should have come to see them as cute baby pigs, but I think pigs are very smart and they would have seen their fate in my eyes. I chose a colorful collection of gourds from the vines that day and piled them into the garden tractor, but when it was time to go home, I forgot to fetch my treasures from the tractor. My friend was so pleased with her gourds, I am sure she will grow them again this year and I will get another chance to pick the ones I like. If my luck holds out, I won’t forget to bring them home.

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I was excited to have the fresh eggs from my friend because fresh eggs to me are forever York, England—a place where my true love and I drove after we abandoned our last baby at Oxford College for a summer study program. She was only fifteen years old and it all seemed so exciting until we arrived to drop her off and then had to leave her. She didn’t have a friend, nor was the study program connected to any familiar school with familiar teachers.

In York, we stayed at a bed and breakfast just beyond the magnificent medieval walls. The youthful innkeepers served eggs fresh from the countryside, delivered by a woman well past eighty years old, still working hard taking care of her hens and delivering eggs to her customers. The eggs had rich coloring to the yolks, not pale or faded. After we ate them, we embarked on charming walks into the city of York, through gardens well tended amid ancient Roman ruins. York, England was the outermost reach of the Roman empire. For a little girl living in the times of Rome’s expansive empires, there was little chance of ever finding out about foreign lands. And for her mother, little anxiety that her daughter might wish to leave home, at a young age, to test the limits of distant horizons and a mother’s fragile heart.

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For our Sunday morning breakfast: I sautéed chopped, sweet onion in olive oil to flavor the olive oil. I scooped out the onion and set it aside. Next, I slipped two eggs into the heated olive oil (one for each of us), careful to keep the yolks unbroken. Then, sea salt and cracked peppercorn medley. (Black peppercorns, coriander, pink peppercorns, white peppercorns, allspice, and green peppercorns.)

Then comes the gentle folding over of the eggs, easy. Fresh bread, or whatever is in the house, is toasted and olive oil is drizzled over the toast. The egg is layered on top of that with the onion and some capers. While preparing the eggs, I had strips of prosciutto cooking under the broiler in the oven, not for long, just enough to crisp it up like bacon.

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After breakfast, I went to work in the garden. How my creative and hungry soul winced when I spied the parsley in the herb garden, barely making it up and out of the earth. Why didn’t I check for it sooner? And not far from the parsley spiked the chives, brilliant green! I could have placed the freshest, sweetest, teeniest brand new leaves of parsley on my exquisite eggs or fancied them up with a few circles of chopped chives! I remember, as I arranged the plate, feeling a restless urge to add some color, either the red of a tomato or a pepper, or the green of fresh herbs.

But, it was time for church in our little cathedral and my true love was bound for the airport and a business trip. I didn’t have all morning to obsess over the eggs. We sat down to share our Sunday breakfast and knew everything was perfect as it was. We had flowers and eggs from a friend, memories, new flavors, and, as always, our prayers of gratitude and one of hope—that the next time we sit down for a Sunday breakfast, we will be heading into the gardens, together, to work all day—building our appetites for dinner!