A SURE SIGN of spring in South County — eggs for sale by the side of the road. Longer days affect the productivity of hens. They need about 14 hours of light to lay one egg a day.

Enough people here raise poultry that by March they’re selling eggs from coolers stationed at the ends of driveways. It’s business according to the honor system — you brake for eggs, you take a dozen, you leave payment — anywhere from $1.25 to $3.50. For this you get new-laid eggs with yolks bright as marigolds, the color determined by type of chicken-feed as well as the number of insects the chicken ingests. The more she forages, the more insects she eats, the deeper orange the yolk. As a bonus, if the flock includes Aracaunas, there will be light blue shells among the browns and whites produced by the favored Rhode Island Reds and other popular birds, such as Barred Rocks, Leghorns, ISA Browns, Sex Links and Bare-Necked Turkens.

Driving down rural South County roads, you see crowds of guinea fowl bustle out of the way, you see flustered, very free-range brown hens race across front yards. You see chicken-tractors — moveable chicken pens — and you see coops with fenced chicken-runs in people’s backyards.

There’s a fluid quality to the population of rural poultry, even though most are confined at night. Released from captivity, they burst out like feathery bombs; they scatter, they coalesce, they peck the ground, they bathe in dust. Flock sizes morph like elastic bands stretched and relaxed, because people here raise varying numbers of birds and breeds, sometimes losing them to predators — foxes, raccoons, fisher cats, coyotes, owls, hawks — and disgustedly renouncing it all for a while, then starting anew because they simply enjoy their flocks and miss tending them.

Within an eight-mile radius of my home, in Woodville, there’s a wealth of places to buy eggs, none of them a conventional store. They can be found in a red-and-white plastic cooler on Shannock Hill Road in Carolina; on the Bradford-Westerly Road by Chapman Pond; on Kuehn, Canonchet, Woodville-Alton and Dunn’s Corners Roads in Hopkinton and Westerly. These eggs are distinctive, with creamy white or dark brown or brown-speckled shells, as well as the occasional blue. Guinea fowl eggs, occasionally available, are rounded, the shells hard, like golf balls. Extra-large chicken eggs frequently have double yolks. Duck and goose eggs, which sometimes can be found locally, are at least twice the size of hen’s eggs and high in sulfur; they give baked goods more volume and a light texture.

When is an egg not an egg? When it’s a metaphor. Eggs by the side of the road epitomize the core values of rural life: resourcefulness, trust, serving one’s neighbors, connection with one’s community, simple nourishment. Whether we stop to buy them or continue on our way, eggs by the side of the road confront us with choices about quality of life and community bonds. Should I buy eggs from a local source and support someone who in these hard times is trying to make a little extra? Or should I perhaps be more efficient and buy them from the supermarket, where I must go to buy other things? Will these eggs be less or more expensive, fresher or in other ways qualitatively better than those in the supermarket? Will the chickens that produce these eggs live better lives than those in factory farms? Why does this matter?

Our mascot chicken, the Rhode Island Red, has yellow legs. You can tell an old Rhode Island Red when the yellow has leeched out of her legs. That means that her laying days are over and the bird’s future starts looking a lot like chicken soup. One of my neighbors, Belinda Learned, whose Stonyledge Farm straddles the Rhode Island-Connecticut border, doesn’t kill her elderly birds. They’re allowed to live out their days among the other animals that Belinda raises with her husband, Ed, a power-company lineman, and their children.

Belinda treats her chickens kindly. When the days become shorter and the laying starts to wane, she doesn’t, as factory farms do, induce the hens by using artificial light in the coops. She lets the chickens rest, because, she says, “Everyone needs to rejuvenate.” Her hens are free-range and nourished without hormones or antibiotics. Their eggs, mainly brown (she raises Rhode Island Reds, White and Brown Leghorns, Sex Links and Barred Rocks), are the size of small duck eggs, which is to say, so enormous that they’re packed in special oversize cartons, and she gets a good price for them at the three farmers’ markets where she vends in high season, and when she leaves them by the side of the road in an honor-system cooler.

You can buy “cage-free” or “free-range” eggs at the supermarket, but what defines these terms? A chicken, as Belinda observes, could be allowed to peck the ground for five minutes a day outside its coop and be labeled “cage free.” Some factory farms subscribe to this practice — it’s a marketing ploy for the “natural” eggs sold at supermarkets at inflated prices. When it comes to food, words like “natural,” and “cage-free,” as well as “organic,” “whole,” and “local” change definition across agencies, state lines, and from merchant to merchant. These terms become fuzzy, confusing and effectively meaningless. What exactly is it that we’re buying?

Like Frost’s road not taken, eggs by the side of the road invite us to consider how things line up if we make a decision that seems small but might be critical. What will result from giving my neighbor $2.50 for a dozen eggs laid by her chickens this morning? This invitation flows into larger questions concerning how attuned we are to our surroundings, how we support our community, and how we live, here in this smallest and most interesting state.

Selma Moss-Ward is a South County-based writer.