every day is a good day
Salad greens picked moments before lunch, one perfect egg laid within the past hour or two to make a silky bowl of mayonnaise, that’s my definition of luxury. Ask your grocer, “I’d like salad greens picked within the last thirty minutes and an egg laid this morning with a yolk as round and bright as the sun.” You won’t be able to get them no matter how much you offer to pay. There are some luxuries even money can’t buy.
Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day. Maybe that is what the chicks are chirping as they huddle under their mother and use her as an umbrella. Mother hens make excellent umbrellas. Not only do they keep the chicks dry, they keep them warm, and look, no hands required. Mother hens are much better than plastic umbrellas.
Unlike baby chicks, cabbages don’t need umbrellas. The rain rolls off their slippery leaves the moment it lands on them.
Nothing says summer is over than a fire in the wood stove. Yesterday, to take the chill off, I lit a fire in the wood stove. Summer is over when the hubbard squash are ready to eat. Summer is over when the vine maples turn crimson. In July, summer seemed like it would go on forever. Rain was a distant memory. I began to question if it ever got cold in the Pacific Northwest. Ha! The joke was on me. With a fire crackling in the wood stove, summer is now the memory.
It’s a pumpkin kind of day. Time to bring in some pumpkins. You know it’s not pumpkin pie if it comes out of a can. Before you can make a real pumpkin pie, you have to feel the pumpkin in your hands, count its ridges, close your eyes and let it tell you how much cinnamon, how many cloves, how much cream it wants. Dream with the pumpkin and get to know it. You can’t do that with the pumpkin in a can. By then it is long dead and past sharing its dreams with you. Most likely, it’s not even pumpkin. It’s probably butternut squash or some other pumpkin wanna be. Life is too short not to have the real thing.
On a pumpkin kind of day, Madge’s chicks are glad to spend the day with their mother. Such days are numbered. Yesterday evening she flew up to the top of the roost to spend the night. Her chicks panicked. “Where is our mother?” they chirped and chirped as they ran around looking for her. The chickens on the roost weren’t about to let them fly up and crawl past them. Her chicks ended up spending the night, sleeping in the nest on the ground where their mother used to curl up with them. It was their first night on their own.
It’s a traumatic ordeal all chicks go through: that first night without their mother. No doubt it is a common topic chickens vent about when they lay bare their hearts to their therapist. “Describe your first night alone, without your mother,” must be a mantra of chicken therapists. It all goes downhill from there.
Madge’s chicks are very content this afternoon. They spent all morning and afternoon with her. Under the hawthorn, they preen and nap. As adults, I wonder if they will dream of this happy afternoon they spent with their mother on this pumpkin kind of day.
Mother hens have a field day when I clear brush along a drainage ditch to prepare for the winter rains. The brush and fallen leaves are so thick, you can’t see their little chicks digging for things to eat in the moist ditch. Chickens love spending much of their day in the woods.
The leaves are turning more each day. It is all the leaves which make the forest a paradise for chickens. The leaves blanket the forest floor when they fall, making a feast for the worms and bugs the chickens savor.
How much time do the chickens which provide the eggs you buy get to spend in the forest? Did the chicken you buy get to walk through a forest to look for tasty grubs to eat?
