With the shortage of eggs, along with most other things, we were lucky to have a couple of chickens that provided us with fresh eggs daily. It was even easy to tell the eggs apart; the gray chicken laid brown eggs and the brown chicken laid white ones. We had gotten into a routine of collecting two eggs from the chicken coop every morning until it abruptly came to a halt, a fate that we all accepted.

One day during science class, in order to give us a short break from actual studies, Mr. Mohammadhosseini told us another one of his stories that we certainly thought was fake. Given the topic of our lesson was plants, he went on to tell us how plants also had feelings and understanding and do much more than we give them credit for. He told us about a friend of his who had a rose bush in his yard but for the past few years it failed to fully bloom in the spring. So one day he grabbed a saw and accompanied by a friend went up to the bush and faked a conversation with his friend about how fed up he was of this bush just doing nothing and that he has no choice but to chop it down. As he placed the saw against the bush, his friend talked him out of it and insisted that he give it one more spring. Per Mr. Mohammadhosseini, that spring the bush produced twice as many flowers as it ever had.

With that story in mind, that day after I got home from school, I went straight to the chicken coop. I delivered a very similar speech and ended it by stating out loud that perhaps I should give the two chickens one more day before we decide to slaughter them. The next morning, mainly to prove Mr. Mohammadhosseini wrong, I checked the chicken coop before getting ready for school. Sure enough there was a white egg there (although no brown one). There continued to be a daily fresh white egg there for some time afterwards.