smarts

In the academic environment, the word "brilliance" has a singular meaning. It's reserved for the elite of the academic elite. A club of sorts. He was a brilliant scholar! -- someone would say. You got the sense that in that person you would encounter near-genius. Everyone else? Mere peons. Foot soldiers of the academic enterprise, never to rise in the way that the true meteors of brilliance would rise.

To me, none of this made great sense, probably because I knew far too many who demonstrated excellence in one domain but were utter fools in their other tasks and endeavors. The stories I could tell about the so called brilliant, when caught off track!

Still, I will admit to this much: I do admire excellence. Many forms of it: in cooking, writing, teaching, painting, machine building, listening. (I'm in awe of brilliant listeners.) Even as no one I know is excellent at everything or even at very many things. It would be too exhausting to try to perfect all that you ever undertook. But I do admire people who try to get pretty good at one thing or another.

Ed comes at this whole muddle of brilliance and excellence from a different angle. When I'm feeling cranky because someone performed really poorly at a skill set you would think they would know inside out (say, for example, scrambling an egg when it is your life's work to scramble eggs for others) and I mumble how that person is clueless, or when I hear someone saying something profoundly off-putting on the news, leading me to groan about the stupidity of said individual, Ed will tell me that everyone has their brilliance.
I'll retort - no, not everyone.
He'll look at me as if now I'm the clueless one: yes, everyone.

I was reminded of this today -- a gray day that could easily make you cranky, especially if you wake up no longer hacking away, but now with a lower back issue all over again, making you absolutely convinced that you are on a path of a rapid decline. I can usually shake off such stiffness, but it takes a few hours and here we have these chickens that are dying, dying to be freed from the coop and I'm in an ancient person's hip joint agony.
You want me to take care of them this morning?
No! Absolutely not! Mustn't get soft!

I do my chicken round of chores and I see that indeed, the weather is making Lexie feisty this morning and the other hens, too, are remembering that when last we saw each other, I had doled out  mealy worms, so rather than letting me tidy their quarters, they all hover at my ankles, waiting for some magic to come flying out of my pockets or hands. It makes it difficult to get anything done.
Sorry guys, I'm going inside the farmhouse. It's cold, drizzly, windy. Have fun.







And I retreat to do back exercises which make me feel much better. As I am stretching this way and that I think -- wow! first morning where I have not taken a single chicken photo!

And then we have breakfast.






And Ed goes off to his machine meeting and I go off for my weekly grocery shopping and the wind continues to usher in dark, puffy clouds and keep the temps unpleasantly in the mid thirties.


Later, as I unload the grocery bags, I see the chickens hovering ever so close to the corner of the pen, watching my every move. And they cluck and beg and so I let them out. Oh, are they happy! They quickly visit all their favorite digging spots as I look on. The two girls work side by side...


 


...and Lexie, as usual, puts all the strength and energy nestled within that scrawny little body into her two footed scratch that sends the dirt flying.











And, too, she has an insatiable curiosity. It's a much overused set of words, except in her case, it's true. If she sees me on the bench, she will run like an Olympian and jump up to the table top just to make sure she's not missing out on anything.





Even as sometimes, she can be hard to love: it's as if she can't help herself and she'll dart and peck at my shoe, then back away, suddenly remembering that this may bring out the meanie in me.


The flock is all over the property today and I cannot get away to do my work. When I'm inside, they quickly move out of my viewing range. Or, they stand by the door, setting off the motion sensor door bell that we have installed for Isis. Again and again. And again.






In either case, I am getting nowhere with my writing. I take a book outside to read at the picnic table, but midthirties and book reading do not mix well, so I say to them -- you've had your two hours of fun. Time to get back in the pen. And I rattle a jar of the coveted mealy worms (when dried, they make a chicken-tantalizing pleasant rattling noise). And the hens run to me, waiting for the distribution. I go into the pen and throw some worms down and there are the three chicks, safely inside the chain link fence.

Not so Oreo. For a guy who is so utterly brilliant at keeping tabs on the brood of hens, understanding in a flash when there is danger and knowing exactly what to do under those trying circumstances, he cannot figure out how to get back in the pen when the girls are inside. And when I try to herd him, he usually ends up in the rosebushes and I have to take a broom to him to get him going again. (He's equally daft about getting out when I open the gate. The girls will come running, he'll look around, see them outside and grumble in low, cocky tone -- now how did you do that?)





Everyone has their own brilliance.


For supper I make Irish fish stew. The weather certainly calls for it.

flip side

If you were wondering if my chicks could sustain chicken bliss on a cloudy, windy, cold day, my answer has to be -- probably not.

They did not get the release at sun rise. I can't say that any of us even noticed when the sun "rose." I mean, what sun?

Ed asked if I wanted him to get the chicks out of the coop and that was a sweet offer, especially since I kept him up half the night hacking away with the remnant of a cough. But I declined. I have this routine going and I don't quite want to step off the beaten path yet: get up, open coop, clean out coop, change water, gather eggs, leave. Once I do that, I know I've done my duty by them. Anything else they get from me during the rest of the day is fluff. With cream and sprinkles on top.

So I do my early morning chicken routines and as I leave, I tell them -- you'll be lucky if you get any real free range time out of me today! I am in no mood to be outside!

Can you blame me? It's never going to get out of the thirties, the wind is biting me right through my winter jacket and I already feel weakened by my week of hacking away -- I don't need even more days of  feeling like I'm moving in the slow gears.



what? no outside time? (Lexie)


In the meantime, as I've been cleaning the coop, Ed has fallen asleep again, possibly in total delight that the hacker herself is no longer in the farmhouse. I do him the favor of staying out of his earshot for the rest of the morning and I make a doctor's appointment to make sure my lungs aren't permanently damaged from all that cough exercise I've been giving them daily. (They're not.)

Finally, when the morning has truly become a very late morning, I make breakfast. Ed asks for an egg and he gets one produced by Butter, who still tends to give us eggs that are great but would pass no beauty contest. We think she just tends to stress easily. A real low key chick, for whom life is just too fast paced, even here at the farmette.





After breakfast, I run over to chat with the doctor about the hacking (see above) and somehow the subject of raising chickens slips into the conversation and she notes -- I've been wanting to look into that... and here we are, weighing the pros and cons  of chickens, as if I were some kind of a chicken expert, merely because for twelve days I have tended to these four foster chicks. (I surely look the part of chicken keeper, what with my oversize mud-smudged sweater, my loosely plated braid that has way too many strand of hair straying from it, and the clogs that I forgot to swap out for civilized shoes.)


I return to the farmette and it is still cold and I think  -- well bummer, this is unfair to them, they should not go from a most perfect day of sunshine and play, to one that is dismal, gray, cold and offers no time for digging in their favorite places (which, thankfully, are not in the middle of my flower beds).

So I let them out.

And there is a kind of frantic pace to their movements today. Lexie comes at me with her beak and then remembers that this is a no no and so she restrains herself (bravo, girl!), but you can see the desire to peck churning within her. The other two hens are also more antsy. Well, gee, kids, I'm giving you this free range time, so go and use it! I point them in the direction of the rose bushes and after a few minutes, I go inside to watch from within the farmhouse.


 
at the front door: don't you want to be with us?


And it's like that, this afternoon: out for an hour, then hustled back into the pen so that I can have some private Ocean author time. Then out again.






Then, finally, in for good.

And now here's a new twist to the routine: Ed points out that our evening chicken chase (for capture and release in the coop) is ridiculous. It stresses them and it most assuredly stresses me. Surely chicken keepers aren't all running around catching their chicks for a lock up to keep them safe from predators. You'd go chicken crazy, especially if your flock is big. He convinces me that the proper procedure is to let the chickens decide when to go to the coop for the night.  Come darkness, they will retire and we shall merely close and latch the door and walk away hand in hand congratulating ourselves on a job well done.

That's his theory.

As is often the case with theories, it proves to be correct. With one small caveat: we need to set an alarm to remind ourselves that the coop must be locked as daylight disappears. The racoons would love it if we forgot that little detail. And I have to admit, tonight, the first night of this new strategy -- we nearly forgot.


Tomorrow is to be a repeat of today's weather. I would bet anything that an Ocean post will offer no great hope for a super happy chicken day. But we can hope for a good day. And that we'll remember to lock up the coop when the darkness sets in.

chicken bliss

Before I got into the business of caring for chickens (now 11 days ago!), I had, in my mind, two categories of poultry: happy chickens and then all the others. For me, happy chickens were ones who had some degree of freedom and green grass under their claws. No overcrowded tenements for them. Clean coops waiting at the end of the day. I wound spend more for their eggs and when their tour of duty was done, I would be willing to make stew out of them.

Things change when you get closer to the flock. If you have hens that don't get along, no one is going to be happy. If illness hits -- your flock of once happy hens can suddenly become the pariah of the community: disease spreads like rapid fire. Our newly found love of organic broilers and friers, or organic eggs means that medicating chickens is suddenly not so straightforward. Eggs from a hen who got a dose of an antibiotic is not organic for a good month after.

Like relationships between us humans, those between humans and hens is... complicated.

But I learned something good today -- something that made me smile: even though I have to reject the simple dichotomy I had held onto for years -- happy/not happy -- still, I came close to intuiting what really does make a hen content. Here are some things that strike me as relevant: 


It's a good beginning to a day when the chicken keeper gets up at dawn and opens up the coop.











While the chickens stretch and ponder the day's coordinates, someone cleans their cage and here's a real pleasant surprise -- pours warm water into the dish inside and then, too, puts out a dish of steamy warm water outside for them.






The chickens take in the morning. The keeper disappears, true, possibly to sustain herself and her co-chicken keeper with breakfast...






...and then, noting the brilliant sunshine outside, comes out again to open up the pen so that the chickens, so ready and waiting at the gate for this, are finally free to roam.

And they do roam. Occasionally the chicken keeper sprinkles kernels of corn so that the chickens come to view her as their hero. Once, she tries to interest them in some flax seed, but guess what -- even though we humans are tickled if they eat flax seed (Omega 3! Must be good!), the chickens themselves could take it or leave it. Actually, truthfully, they leave it. So if you're eating eggs where the chickens were fed flaxseed,  know that it was not of their own choosing.

The sky is so blue! The two chicken keepers sit at the picnic table in the courtyard because the rays of the sun feel so warm, so good! Even if the temps are still on the low side (at most 40F), the jacket gets tossed aside. The air is still. All is quiet.

So quiet in fact, that one by one, the chickens slow down...






...and then completely stop their foraging. Butter's the first to figure out how good it is to just bask in all that sunshine.





But the others soon follow.






And so here we are: Ed and I and the four chickens, spread out in our small courtyard, each enjoying the heavenly sunshine, the unexpected pleasure of a most perfect day. (And note the pattern of sunshine coming in through the porch roof!)





And if this isn't chicken bliss, then I don't know what is.


But that's not the end of it! If the chicken keepers go out to the far corner of their farmette to tidy up the veggie plot for this year's new crop of corn, broccoli, cucumbers and who knows what else and ponder the creation of pea trellises and new beds for their 96 containers of planted tomatoes, the chickens may follow to see a new world out there. They watch with intense interest as Ed pulls out spent corn stalks.






And then, in the late afternoon, as one of the chicken keepers takes a book to read outside at the picnic table and the chickens are out again, guess what might make a chicken really happy! A dirt bath! Watching Whitney roll in the dirt in the courtyard is delightful for me (I don't have to share quarters tonight with her), possibly less so for the other chickens who regard her with a bit of pity: her angelic white feathers are now streaked with dirt!



a speckled Butter





Lexie puffs out her white down, appalled at Butter below


You know, I can't really put my finger on chicken happiness yet. I know, for example, the Lexie still struggles to control her run and peck inclinations (she succeeds more than she fails though!). And Butter's eggs still have a flat side to them, indicating her stress earlier this week (moving away from her sisters and girlfriends to a small coop occupied by Oreo and Lexie would stress anyone -- you and me included).

But man oh man, if you were the chicken keeper and you looked out at your brood in those hours of sunshine today, quietly resting, or playing, or moving together in pairs, or as a foursome, you'd think -- now there's one happy flock!

Of course, you will have understood, I'm sure, that chicken bliss doesn't stray too far in kind from human bliss: surround yourself with those who love you, protect you, stay quiet and calm together, listen to the spring sounds, raise your face to the sun -- bliss.

ten days

For ten days, we've been caring for the foster chickens. And who would doubt that they have finally settled in. Probably for the long haul. (In fact, we haven't seen the owners for many days -- it's as if they have handed over the job to us. Possibly happy to be freed from their care.)

If we thought that having foster chickens (instead of raising our own from a hatchery) would be in some way easier, less permanent -- well, that obviously was incorrect. We have invested so much time and effort on this! And, too, their owners are counting on us. So, it surely feels like a very un-temporary foster care arrangement. (I try not to think about winter: winter scares me. I don't think their coop is perfect for them for all those cold months. Such a small shared space! But maybe in the winter chickens don't move much? I can't answer that. Right now, we're facing the best of the good months and caring for chickens seems oddly pleasant.)

This is not to say that we are without chicken worries. I sit in the kitchen and glance out at the pen. Lexie is running to hide under the roosting box. The other hens file into the coop. Oreo is on alert. I surely know this drill: there is a hawk above them. I'm ready to help Oreo, but as I dash outside I see that the hawk is gone. Our birds are in a pen shaded by the crab apple tree. Nearly hawk proof. And Oreo does not let down his guard.

It's a cold morning (a really cold and windy morning!).  Butter is not too keen on scratching and foraging. She picks spots, makes nests for herself and dozes, oblivious to predators, people, the flock. Or, is it that she is lethargic due to illness? I wont admit to the hours we spend this evening researching all the things that can go wrong with chickens. Random illness that can ravage your flock. Snap, chicks are gone. Such words as culling creep into the literature.
What does that mean? -- I ask, even though in the case of sick chickens, it's obvious.

Lexie remains spirited and would you believe it -- the recommendation to kick rather than speak in soothing tones worked! She has not pecked me a single time since I knocked her down the other day. Still, I just can't take great pleasure in being top hen. Not if it means kicking scrawny screeching chickens.

Other details? Well,  I'm moving slowly still -- or at least slower than I'm used to. Almost fine, but still a little low on the charge level. And, too, after a warm day, the cooler readings feel like a let down. So that it takes us a while to go out in the morning. At 34F, it felt like we were still on the tail end of winter.

But, after breakfast (during which we actively engage in chicken talk)...






... we do go out and so does the brood and they follow us as we heave cartload after cartload of wood chips for the flower beds. (Okay, Ed heaved, I raked.) We work until we run out of chips.



 


Probably the hardest ritual (chicken wise) is the evening lock up of the flock in the coop. The chickens don't want to go in. Yet, we can't leave them out. Racoons, I tell them, it's because of the racoons! But I know that chickens don't much go in for people speak.


So, ten days of chickens. Much more fretting than I would have anticipated. Less odious than I feared. Delightful at times. Worry filled at other times.

Let me end on an upbeat note: here's a photo of Oreo -- poor, crippled Oreo, standing majestically in the evening sun.






(Here's a close up after a successful attempt to scoop him up and retire him to the coop.)






And here is one of Isis, walking past one of the big girls. She follows him, watches, he sits, waits. Maybe they even like each other a little. Maybe.

the scent of almonds

First, I have to tell you that I so appreciate all your notes and comments on my chicken adventure (or chicken mess, in a less optimistic reading)! It's a less lonesome journey when you know someone is laughing at the sidelines. You're reminded that life can be a pretty funny business.

Now, onto the topic at hand: a second warm day, though not nearly as magnificent as Sunday. The clouds are with us almost from the beginning.






Only by evening do the skies clear, but by then it is too late: I've sold my soul to an Ed expedition, almost entirely indoors. But that's a later story. Let me scoot back to the beginning of the day:


I get up with a deeply felt gratitude for the freshly erected chicken pen (remember: there is the small little house -- that's the coop -- and around it, there is now a 12 x 18 foot movable fence, creating a pen for the chickens in the hours that I want to ignore them). The cold cold days that were with us the day the chickens arrived chilled me enough so that I now have a hacking cough and though I can hardly complain -- I'm not really sick -- I do note that I also have a painfully blocked ear and so spending time with chickens is about the last thing on my wish list, even on this unusually warm day. In fact, after I clean the coop and let them out into the pen, I crawl back into bed and fall asleep.

Bliss.

Later in the morning, I am almost my old self again. A nurse friend suggests some mineral oil and a cotton swab for the ear. I look around my cabinets. No mineral oil, but I do have a bottle of almond oil from days when I did my moonlighting stint at L'Occitane. And so I float through this day on a cloud of almond blossoms tossed around by the day's warm breezes. How lovely is that!

At breakfast...






...we do talk about the chickens. A funny thing has happened in the course of the week. I've become much more "what the hell" about the birds. They are, as I write, roaming the greater yard somewhere. What the hell. Others let their chickens roam, without fencing, even as they live in the suburbs. Why am I so jittery about it?! So I let them roam now, darting only an occasional glance to make sure they are not destroying my flower beds. Peck away, birds! Clear out the pests, the creeping charlie, stir up things in the soil! But none of this hole digging in my flowers. Save that for the wood chipped courtyard.




And if I once thought about mimicking the ideas of the chicken lecturer (who got us hooked at least on the idea of chickens) -- putting out, as she does, sprigs of lavender into their roosting area, presumably to send the chicks adrift on some voyage of fragrant ecstasy, now, after nearly a week of chickens, I look the birds in the eye and say -- kids, be glad you have a foster home with a meticulous chicken keeper who, instead of clearing your droppings twice a week, reaches in and polishes up your quarters twice a day.  Springs of lavender? You gotta be kidding! You're spoiled enough.

Ed, on the other hand, continues to spin and improvise and he comes up with improvements and structural alterations constantly, all day long.
We could put up additional fencing and create a series of pens. I could build... And so on.


We are different that way, he and I. If I spin about anything at all, it is not about the structural integrity of their play areas, but rather, on their psychological development. I know chickens have a far greater intelligence than our grandparents or even parents allowed for. So I want to treat them with that in mind. When Lexie pecks at us, I want to reason with her. Show her a better way to communicate. Swoop her in my arms and hold her until she settles.

The literature is completely not with me on this. She wants to dominate, I read. Peck her back or else she'll terrorize you. 

Well now, I don't have a beak, but I understand the message here: I am thinking like a human, not like a chicken. Rap her on the head, kick her in the gut. It's the only way to get her to stop trying to assert herself against the human form.

My reaction is twofold: good! someone else speaks the chicken tongue and has an explanation and a solution for me. But on the other hand -- kick a chicken in the stomach? Is it like the old advice columns that would tell us to leave our infants crying so that they'd toughen up? (I hated that message and pretty much ignored it.) I mean, in two years, will they call a chicken head-rapper "cruel," rather than "one who speaks the chicken language?"

Besides, Lexie is the scrawny one. She is already pushed aside by the two big girls. They are so dominant that when she digs in her own sweet pile of dirt and they come over, she steps aside and lets them have it, leaving nothing for herself. (Okay, she's got Oreo, but still, she is the shrimp in this brood of four.) So how can you push away a scrawny brat?

But after a week of swooping up and cradling, I see that Lexie is not only not improving, but she is getting worse. I'm reinforcing her nipping! She runs over when she sees me, dances around my feet and starts to peck away: shoes, socks, anything within reach. I pick her up with a hug and tell her she is the most wonderful scrawny little chicken in the world. I let her down, she nips some more.

So today I try a gentle nudge instead. No, that's wrong. She thinks I'm engaging her and that it is an easy battle -- one that she can win. I try a firmer nudge (some would call it a kick) that sends her flying. The nipping stops. She walks off and concentrates on improving the landscaping at the farmete.





And with Lexie otherwise occupied, I spend time with the other two girls. These are chicks who have had a lot of human contact in the first year of life (I have finally a clarification here: the whole brood is just short of a year old). But I've ignored them thus far, concentrating on the scrawny she-devil herself. So I reach out to the big hens, Butter and Whitney and I think how easy it would be if the entire flock was as calm as these two girls are. But of course, this is the challenge of taking in foster chicks: they come with their life's issues. You are their mentor now. You must do well by all of them.






In the afternoon, Ed and I are to take the pickup to Farm and Fleet. If you're not from Wisconsin (or Iowa or Illinois -- and I know that most Ocean readers are not from these states) then you wont know much about this place. Ed worships it in quite the same way I would worship a sustainable/organic/concerned food store. I want that food store to do the homework for me as to which producer/farmer/fishery does the best job at keeping us healthy and as kind to the planet as we humans are capable of being. Ed wants his store to do the research on which fencing, tools --  oh, the list is so long! -- are the most durable, economical, worth owning. Farm and Fleet is, for him, that store.

I have become Ed's shopping buddy for these outings and let me tell you, they can stretch over a very long block of time as he looks and compares. After, he is always in his most adoring mood, mumbling sweet things like -- I had such a good time with you today, gorgeous! -- as if we'd gone on a special date to Madison's finest restaurant.

We're to pick up discounted snow fencing and chicken wire. Screws, two by twos, a brush to clean the coop net floor. And mud clogs for me. (Return those frou frou boots to Zappos -- he tells me. You need the real stuff from Farm and Fleet.)

And so here we are, with a list yay long, ready to go, except that the truck engine wont start.
I say -- it's the battery. (That's because in my limited world, dead cars can only have dead batteries.)
He says -- it can't be. I just recharged it.
He fiddles. He puts on cables. Eventually it starts.
Are we going to get stuck somewhere?
He grins, as if relishing the adventure of it all.

First stop, Menard's. Another construction materials chain. No good builder, I'm told, shops here. But, we need to compare. We look, we get back in the truck. And again it wont start, only this time, there isn't a friendly car next to ours, ready to help us jump the battery. Which seems very lifeless.
Should you maybe get a new battery? I ask this because it is now obvious that we have a fully dead one.
Not here, he says, horrified. We need to get to Farm and Fleet. Do you know how to pop the clutch?
So funny. Do I know how to pop the clutch!
What's that?
You bump-start the car by popping the clutch. I'll push, you pop... no, never mind -- if you've not done it before, it wont work.
I'll push the truck then... Gales of laughter from Ed on that one.

I sit there feeling completely worthless. And a sorry state of womanhood, too, what with my most torn up jacket and the old winter cap pulled snugly over my plugged up with cotton ear even though it is a whopping 65F outside.  I sit back behind the cracked windshield and watch as he does a one-man stunt of pushing the truck, jumping in, pumping the clutch, releasing the pedal and rolling forward as the engine rumbles to life -- all this in between the parked cars of Menard's parking lot.

Ed can be very impressive.


Evening at the farmette. Around us, the call of the sandhill crane is now ever present.






And I see that to the east, the truck farmers are, for the first time, starting to tend to the fields.







There is a restlessness in the air that comes with that gusting warm breeze. I let the chickens out of the pen, against my better judgment. I know it will be murderously difficult to get them back in on such a night, but they are so happy to be foraging on this warmest day of the year (and I must note that tomorrow, we jump back down to reality). I relax. In fact, I take my laptop to the porch for the first time this year and I type bits of this post there, watching the chicks move daintily between buds of emerging flowers.





Of course, the chickens come up to the porch door and stare at me, trying hard to figure out this next life's puzzle for them: how is it that I am now in a cage and they are out?

Ponder away, dear ones. Someday I'll be better able to understand you and you'll be better able to understand me, but in the meantime, we're having a pretty damn good time of it, don't you think?

Sunday

It was, as promised, a magnificent day -- the best of the year so far, here, in the Upper Midwest. Lexie the wee hen has been vocalizing and she is so obscenely loud that you have no doubt she is singing with joy. By comparison, Butter settles in at my feet quietly and does a modest amount of self cleaning. A girl after my own heart because, of course, at the farmette, Sunday is farmhouse cleaning day.

But before we even get there, we let the brood out, just after sunrise, right into their new little pen. They like it. They don't like it. They're okay with it. They're puzzled. How about the wider world out there? Isn't that ours as well? We ignore them and go about our house chores.

Even though, over breakfast, the discussion quickly shifts again to the chickens.





Is the pen a good place for them? Ed says -- we should have enclosed a rose bush. They like rose bushes. It's boring in that pen. Next time we have to include some distractions.
I mean, we're like the parents whose personal life ended the day the first kid popped into the world.

In the late morning, we go outside to work in the yard and of course, this is when we're happy to let the chickens roam freely.  And they do.






But here's an emerging pattern: whereas the bigger girls settle in to do their pecking and dirt scratching, Lexie runs up to you and squawks and pecks. We can't quite figure out what she wants. She will peck on your shoe, your hand, anything to let you know that she is there.






Ed settles in to make adjustments to the fencing, the gate and, too, he installs an electric plug in the coop, so that when we want to plug in the water dish or, next winter, a heating lamp, it'll be an easy chore. Me, I turn to yard clean up: branch trimming. Rosebush pruning. Raking. Strawberry patch repair. We work together, but on our separate tasks and I am in my bubble of yard bliss, content as can b, until I hear Ed proclaim with total conviction -- she's going to be the first one to wind up in the frier. 

It seems that Lexie has climbed into his lap and is clamoring for his full attention. So who's the boss here anyway??





I remove Lexie and try have a heart to heart with her, but the young -- they're so spirited and quick moving that it's hard to get them still enough for a lecture.

In the afternoon, we leave the chickens in the pen (yes, but will they all be there when we get back? The "what ifs" are endless!). It's time to enjoy the sunshine, to get moving again -- in other words, to go on a spring hike at Indian Lake County Park. My older girl, Ed and I.

And it is at once brilliant and beautiful...






...but at the same time, slippery and muddy. Really muddy. But oh, that warm air! To think that we are at the edge of the freshest, most hope filled and inspired season!  Truly the heart swells.






At home, the chickens survived in the pen without us! No one flew away, no hawk flew in. They clamor now to come out into the wider world of rosebushes and compost piles and we open the gate and let them do just that. But come dusk, it's time to put them in the coop for the night. My daughter and her husband are at the farmette and they laugh hard as they watch me chase Whitney and Butter in circles. Dinner would have been very late if my son-in-law hadn't stepped in to help me herd the last of the brood into the coop.






We eat a supper of favorite daughter foods. Ed looks at his plate and recoils. Chicken? That could be Lexie on your plate.
We almost had a whole meal without bringing up chickens. Almost.

tomatoes more chicken stories

Long into the night, Ed searches the Internet for fencing solutions for our foster chicks. Movable. Any enclosure has to be movable. But the chickens need space! Should we put in posts? Not in our clay soil! By August, that dirt is hard as cement! We watch endless youtube videos. We read pages and pages of comments on what does or does not work (and when I am dozing off already, Ed reads some more). Finally, we decide to invest in a very large dog pen -- on sale on Craigslist. It's made of chain-link panels (movable!) and it's big enough (we think!) to keep our hens happy.

But the person selling it is far south of us. Nearly an hour's drive. No matter: Saturday dawns to be a beautiful day! An outing would be just fine.
















Early, just after the sun rise, we let the guys out of the coop -- and they are in a hurry to be out! -- and we are reminded how adorable they can be. Morning is their good time. And it's our good time too. They're refreshed, we're refreshed.  They're happy to be foraging and curious about our movements around the courtyard.

I hesitate about leaving them out while we eat breakfast, but Ed convinces me we can eat and watch from the kitchen window. We do that.






And except for one panicked moment (where are they?? I don't see them!), we manage a meal inside without a major chicken mishap.

Outside again, we tend to small farmette chores.  And again, it is such a good stretch of time! The chickens scratch, peck, move around freely and when they tire, they rest under the rose bushes. But mostly they don't tire. They follow us like bandits, watching, as if to learn our steps, as if we could open doors for them, as if we were the holders of keys to life's more interesting rewards.

All the while, Oreo never lets down his guard. Well, except when Ed goes off to get some compost soil. Oreo wants to follow for some private guy time.






Because it is a beautiful, sunny day (42F is indeed heavenly when the sun is out), we decide to launch our great tomato seed planting project. I'm noting it down this year in my planting files: March 28, seeds go into soil cups.

Well now, we have company. Compost soil? Interesting! Anything there for us?











At first we're all smiles and playful pats on their curious heads. After a while, we're wishing the kids would go out and play away from the picnic table and leave us to our work. Lexie, the petite hen, is predictably, the biggest troublemaker. When she wants your attention, she will peck at you until you deliver. You can't push her away. She pecks harder then. You fare better if you swoop her up, pat her head for a minute or two and release her in another spot in the garden. Your hope is that she'll be distracted. Sometimes she is, other times, she is right back at your side, hammering for whatever it is her sweet little chicken head imagines is an appropriate reward for a chicken. The bigger girls don't have any patience for Lexie's intrusiveness. We're more sympathetic, all the while thinking -- by this afternoon, we can put them inside a big pen!

Oreo crows. All will be right again.

But I have to admit, tomato seed planting is a bit crazy this year. If I thought I would be more organized with it, I was wrong. The chickens, the arrival of Isis, protecting him from them and them from him (so far, no one has declared war -- they all just stare at each other) -- all this is hard when you're counting seeds and labeling each planted cup.





I tell Ed -- it could well be that packet X went into cup labeled as Y.
He laughs. What does it matter? Orderly planting has never been a top priority for him.

But, we make progress. 60 cups planted, 30 to go.


And now it is time to drive the pickup truck south for our chain link panels. And it's as if all the quirky pieces of our foster chicken experiment at last begin to fall into place. The panels are enormous, but easy to lift. True, the connector pieces are missing, an we're sent to a different household at the other end of the earth, but in the end we have everything we need to build a contained, free range space for our brood.

You may wonder -- is it free range when there is a fence around them? What is free range anyway? Possibly you'd be surprised to know that there is no regulatory explanation to help you out: no consistency, no agreement, no definition at all. If a farmer wants to stamp "free range" on her carton of eggs, she may do so, even if the birds spend only five crowded minutes in some outdoor space -- dirt, grass, concrete, it hardly matters. It's different in Europe where the rules are precise: give each bird at least 4 square meters of space at all times or wipe that free range label off your egg. Oh, that Europe! Always regulating everyone to death! Can't just let the marketplace function of its own accord like we do!



We're home now. It's late -- the afternoon shadows are long and it's harder to find a warm sunny spot in the farmette courtyard. We let the chickens out (and oh, are they anxious to get out of that coop!). They keep an eye on us, but they're happy, too, to fan out into the warmer grasses beyond the courtyard.





I finish planting the tomatoes (96 containers, 1 - 2 seeds each!), Ed begin work on building a base for the coop and then, finally we get to setting up the chain link panels. We position the coop inside the cordoned space. It's not the most beautiful sight in the world, but it makes us so very happy to be done with it. (We have a better location for it for later in the season. For now, we want them close to the farmhouse.)




We shake our heads with amazement: how lucky to have found this set up on Craigslist at one tenth the regular cost of fencing! How delightful it will be to get up in the morning and let them out and then roll back for a few more minutes of sleep if that's our inclination! We put the pen under trees -- safe from most hawks, safe from daytime predators (we hope).

The sun has nearly disappeared by the time we put the last wrench and screwdriver away. The chickens squawk about going back into the coop (they must be locked in for the night to be safe from racoons) in much the same way that kids squawk when they don't truly understand what's good for them. I give Lexie a nice cradled hug after one of the brood pecks her hard on her little head. (That girl is a pest, but she surely bears a disproportionate share of grief at the hands of her buddies.) I close the coop, then latch the gate.

We have Chinese take-out for supper. Please, nothing chicken related. And tomorrow? Tomorrow I'm hoping to return to more sane routines.