One of the hens lays a speckled egg. It’s among the most beautiful of eggs I find. Which hen lays this wonder? I’m not sure. I like to think that whoever it is, she lays it on days when the sunshine is speckled. It doesn’t work that way.
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Speckled Sunshine – Speckled Egg
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Tracks Left Behind
Nothing moves without leaving behind a track, some evidence it was here. I heard an interesting article on NPR that as we move, we leave behind a cloud of microbes as unique to us as our fingerprints. Yesterday, I left a track bicycling to the post office and the feed store, the one on the right, and one when I came home on the left. With the snow gone today, those tracks are gone, but there could be microbes that dropped from the cloud of microbes that drift around me.
Anna left behind this beautiful egg today. I’m pretty sure it’s hers. It was the only egg on the nest she was last sitting in. It’s a gorgeous tract.
More tracts are these winter sage, rosemary, thyme, and oregano. Chopped up, I used them in our lunch. They are now in my belly, leaving traces behind as they flow through me. Bits of them my body will absorb. Eventually bits will ooze through my pores and become invisible microbes floating in the cloud around me. A week from now, my dog may sniff the tracts I leave behind and wonder why it smells like oregano. Things never go away, they just flow on and on and on.
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A Fairy Dusting of Snow
We woke up this morning to a fairy dusting of snow. It was still falling but the snowflakes were so fine, you needed fairy glasses to see it falling. The fine snow didn’t deter Nina from taking her little chicks out to forage. There is almost nothing that will deter a mother hen.
This is Anna’s first snow. Hmm, she’s not sure what to make of it. One step forward, then another, she goes. If she ever raises chicks in the snow, I wonder what she’ll tell them about it. “My first snow was breast deep and …” She looks like a hen with an imaginative mind.
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Now I Know
What happens when raw eggs freeze? We have had many days of freezing nights. In the shade, the frost hasn’t melted for days, getting thicker with each passing day. On Saturday, I found an old nest where some of the hens have been laying eggs. The last time I checked that nest was five days ago and I stopped checking every day as no hens were laying eggs there.
The hens must have been watching and noticed I wasn’t checking that nest anymore because they started laying eggs there once I stopped checking. The eggs were freezing cold and some were a number of days old.
Hmm? Are these ice cold, frozen eggs any good? I let them thaw a day and cracked them open today. They were perfect. Now I know. If an egg stays on a nest a few days in freezing weather, it will be fine.
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Dazzling Blooms in the Midwinter?
You’ll find the most dazzling blooms of the year in your garden in midwinter. White starbursts of ice petals which dazzle in the morning sunlight. You never see shimmering blossoms like this in the summer. These aren’t flowers you can take indoors to enjoy. They’ll melt in your fingers before you make it to your door. You have to enjoy them outdoors in the biting cold.
