Every time I visited, I stared at the bowl of hard-boiled eggs sitting on the counter, worrying about how long they’d been there. It drove me crazy. My grandmother never put them in the fridge, and I was terrified someone would get sick eating them after they had been sitting out for over 12 hours. I started to worry that maybe her memory was slipping, or she was forgetting basic kitchen hygiene.
One day, I finally tried to gently explain food safety to her, citing the two-hour rule. I put on my serious face and started talking about bacteria and the FDA.
She interrupted me with a soft laugh. She didn’t look offended or confused. She looked at me with pure love.
“Oh, I know they last longer in the cold,” she said. “But I leave a few out because I remember how much you used to cry when your fingers got cold peeling them from the fridge when you were little.”
I stopped mid-lecture. The guilt hit me like a truck. I thought she was being careless, but she was actually being incredibly thoughtful. She wasn’t forgetting the rules; she was remembering me. She was prioritizing my comfort over shelf-life, holding onto a memory of me as a child that even I had forgotten.
I quietly thanked her, realizing that sometimes love doesn’t follow FDA guidelines. I ate the egg. Though I did make a point to start visiting earlier so I could catch them while they were still hot from the pot, rather than “counter warm.”
