This is a family story that happened to my cousin Karan about how a small farm habit turned into something bigger and opened up a new world to her.

Ask any baby boomer about their family history, and more likely than not, their grandparents or cousins lived on a farm. The ‘family farm’ is almost gone now, but a generation ago, it was the norm…and all of us, if we didn’t live on one, visited one, often. We played in haylofts, rode horses, lassoed pigs, and collected eggs.

Every farmer had 20 or more chickens and they were ‘free range’ before free range was cool. They were penned up but I can remember them just pecking around in the yard, too. Farm families liked fresh eggs, and extra eggs were sold in the local town for ‘pin money.’ They ate the chickens too, but that is another story. Lest you think the chickens were pets, know this: no one named ‘em.

Old farm joke: My dad didn’t do well raising chickens. I am not sure if he planted them too deep or too close together.

For fun, kids of the day would write their name on the eggs that were to be sold in town, a farm version of the message in the bottle. The fun was in sending the autographed eggs out into the world, and imagining who might read your name on your egg. That’s as far as it went.

My cousin Karan had a different experience. When she was six, after she had autographed some eggs, she received a letter in a long envelope with stamps clear across the top, from Valpariso, Chile.

Turns out her eggs were found by a cook on a ship that was taking WWII refugees to Chile. The egg finder, William, wrote her and began corresponding with this little six year old girl from Longford, Kansas. She got postcards from every port he visited–Italy, Peru, Ceylon, Argentina, Trinidad. Each postcard went into a special scrapbook called “The Egg and I,” and Karan’s penpal, who she now called Uncle Bill, was quite the hit in her second grade classroom.

Soon, Uncle Bill started sending her native dolls from the same ports…can you just imagine the thrill of it all? A little farm girl getting gifts from a kind stranger, dolls dressed in the native garb of Brazil, Germany, Panama and so on.

And then one day, he called her. He and his wife, New Yorkers by now for goodness’ sake, were traveling doing a cross country Greyhound bus tour and called from Abilene and wanted to see her. So Uncle Bill spent three whole days with the Longford farm family and got to know the little girl who wrote her name on some eggs.

Karan finally wrote the story down here.  It should be a movie.

Do you have any family stories you would like to share?  And if anyone knows New Yorker, ex-chef, married to Marie William Lukesh, will you please tell him hello.