The Chick Stays in the Picture

Apology in advance: This is another column about poultry.

I promise that “Faith in Vermont” will not begin focusing entirely on chickens and ducks. Still, the truth is that I’m learning a great deal about life, love, death, and motherhood from the silly, smelly, feathered fowl who share our land.

In my last column, I wrote about losing two of our chickens to a fox. A couple of weeks later, in what seemed like poetic justice, one of our broody hens hatched out a new chick.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Death Comes to the Coop

When the first chicken disappeared, it wasn’t a big deal.

She’d been one of eleven chickens – ten hens and a rooster – of indeterminate age, passed on to us by friends. We’d always considered this our “starter flock,” and planned to add fresh chicks in the spring.

We live in a predator-rich area, so every night we lock our chickens into a sturdy coop behind an electrified wire fence. But because we held these chickens loosely, and because it seemed to go against their nature and purpose to keep them confined to a 400-square-foot yard, we let them free range during the daylight hours.

This system worked beautifully for about two months, until the night I counted the chickens that’d come home to roost and came up one short.

She was a black bantam hen, one of three black bantys who scuttled nervously around Elvis the rooster all day long, like a jittery teenage fan club. After she’d been gone for two days, we declared her “missing, presumed dead.” My daughters were a little wistful, but not for long. Nobody had been particularly attached to this hen, whose personality was all humble subservience to her mate. We’d never even given her a name; in order to have something to write on her rock-tombstone in our animal cemetery (which joined the memorials of three deceased tadpoles), my daughters named her “Dianne” posthumously.

Because we’d never found a body – not even a feather – Dianne’s disappearance was shrouded in mystery. Lack of a body indicated that a hawk or a fox was the likely predator. We kept our eyes open, kept the chickens confined to their run for a couple of days, and then assumed that the threat had passed. Some days, we even joked that Dianne had gotten sick of following Elvis around and faked her own death; she was probably living a life of adventure in the treetops, or lounging on Palm Beach.

Then, a week later, Henrietta disappeared.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Through My Children’s Eyes

At the beginning of the summer, our entire family attended my 20^th college reunion.

I’m not a reunion person; I spent my first 15 years of adulthood moving frequently enough to rid me of whatever nostalgia I might be tempted to nurture – which I suspect wasn’t much to begin with. But this was my 20^th reunion, it was only about two hours away, friends exerted pressure, and my daughters had begun expressing interest in my alma mater. So, late one spring evening, I found myself registering online for my reunion, paying an exorbitant amount to house six people on three dorm-room beds.

My alma mater is Williams College, a small liberal arts school nestled among the Berkshire Mountains in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, just over the Vermont border from Bennington. It bears a striking similarity in both size and location to Middlebury College, which explains one particular moment from the reunion weekend.

One of the highlights of the reunion was not only the chance to reconnect with old friends, but observing our children become friends as well – as if to confirm that we’d chosen our cronies well two decades prior. On the final evening of reunion weekend, as our children romped together on the green grass of a quad surrounded by pillared academic buildings and, beyond them, the rolling slopes of the Berkshires, my friends waxed nostalgic about the setting.

Isn’t it wonderful, they said, to come to a place where our children can just run free and we don’t have to worry about them? And: Look at that view! Isn’t it just beautiful here?

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Surviving Summer, Parts 1 & 2

Summer seems to be zipping along at such a pace that I realized I’d forgotten to post two recent articles that I wrote for the Minibury website. Both are part of a three-part series on “Surviving Summer,” a seasonal take on my regular “Our Favorite Things” column.

Part 1, which you can read by clicking here, focuses on summer reading, including six of our favorite books/series, which have the distinction of appealing to readers within our family’s 4- to 9-year-old age range.

Click here to read Part 2, in which I recommend some of our favorite games to help pass long summer afternoons indoors — important if you’re having a very rainy summer, as we are here in Vermont.

Happy reading! Happy playing! Happy summer!

The Eggs and Us

When our next-door neighbor phoned the other morning to ask if we could spare an egg for the pancakes she was making for breakfast, I laughed out loud. Of COURSE we could spare AN egg! How about a dozen?

Our family’s life over the past month has been dominated by eggs. Eggs – those round or oval reproductive bodies produced by the female of certain animals – are everywhere: in our yard, in our refrigerator, on our kitchen windowsill, on our plates.

The most obvious reason for this is our acquisition of ten hens (and a rooster) from friends who were thinning out their flock. The chickens are all at least two years of age, which is around peak laying age. The good thing about this: We got eggs right away! On the other hand: It’s all downhill from here.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Floored by Vacuuming

When I was growing up in Northern Virginia, I had a number of friends whose families were of Asian origin. Whenever I visited these friends at home, the rule was to remove one’s shoes immediately after walking in the door, leaving them in the front hallway, vestibule, foyer, or whatever the entryway. Back then, this seemed like an exotic practice, one that I associated with bamboo floor mats, Hello Kitty!, and rice served in delicate blue-and-white porcelain. In my own house, we wore our shoes all the time.

Just typing that last sentence fills me with horror: We wore our shoes all the time. Now, I can’t imagine ever wanting to wear shoes inside the house. Now, it goes without saying, the rule in my own home is to remove our shoes immediately after walking in the door and leave them in the mudroom. This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I’m married to a man whose family is of Chinese origin; it has everything to do with the fact that I know where our shoes have been.

Click here to continue reading about our house of horrors in my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

Planting Panic

Next year, I tell myself, I’ll know better.

Next year, I will commit to very little between April and June, and I will clear our family’s schedule for an entire month beginning two weeks before Memorial Day.

No signing up for preschool snacks. No dinner or birthday parties. No expectation that dishes will be washed, laundry folded, or floors swept. No newspaper columns!

I knew that gardening and poultry raising would be a lot of work. I expected labor. What I didn’t expect was the massive to-do list that seems to regenerate endlessly within my brain: chop off some tasks and, like an earthworm, it just grows more. I didn’t expect to track the weather forecast like a day trader tracks the stock market, my heart dropping with every raincloud icon that threatens to keep me out of the yard (yes, I know the rain is good for the plants.) I didn’t expect to feel intense frustration whenever I’m not outside digging or dumping or planting — the sense that all life not involving dirt is somehow wasting my precious time. I didn’t expect to rush off to so many meetings with dirty fingernails, muddy knees, and hat-head hair. I didn’t expect to keep finding myself outside, staring at a patch of dirt, until my husband or children call me in to dinner.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Two for One!

Despite what feels like far too long a stretch of grey skies and rain, spring is truly springing in the Green Mountains, with all sorts of green and flowery friends reemerging every day. So I guess it’s appropriate that this has been a productive week for writing: I have not one, but TWO new posts up over the past two days.

Here’s my latest installment of “Our Favorite Things” on the Minibury website, which focuses on tips for gardening with children.

And here’s today’s “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent, in which I describe three recent experiences in community.

Agway Adventures

I am sitting in Carol’s Hungry Mind Café to write this column, as I do nearly every Saturday afternoon. Usually I crave this time, when my husband takes our daughters so that I can have a handful of silent and solitary hours – usually my only silent and solitary hours of the week – in order to “work.” (“Work” is in quotations, because being alone to write feels more like play to me.)

But today I had to force myself to come here. Today it was only the threat of a looming deadline that compelled me to drive over to Carol’s. The light rain helped, too. Still, I couldn’t resist stopping in at Agway before landing at Carol’s.

It was my third visit to Agway this week.

Right now, I am not craving silent time to write so much as I am craving time to start seeds, dig and weed, compost and mulch, reseed the lawn, and help my husband finish off the poultry fencing. I want dirt under my fingers more than computer keys.

I’m distracted because it’s spring, of course. Really and truly spring – I think. In Vermont, April is still on the risky side of spring: We are still balancing along the wire of the average last frost, still unsure that Mother Nature won’t throw us one final snowstorm for good measure. But my online forecast shows evening temperatures above freezing for the next ten days, so I’ve taken the plunge and put my spring planting schedule into play.

Spring planting means plenty of visits to Agway, our closest lawn, garden, farm, and pet supply store. And because the only time I’m guaranteed freedom from my children is Saturday afternoon, I usually visit Agway with at least some of my daughters.

Click here to read my latest “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Backyard Birds and Growing Up

I have become a person who watches birds.

For as long I’ve known him – my entire life – my father has been a birdwatcher. Growing up, we always had bird feeders in the yard and birdhouses (which he built himself) on our trees. He could usually, immediately, name any bird that happened by; if he couldn’t he’d pull down our 1965 copy of A Guide to Field Identification: Birds of North America. When he passed that book on to our family this past year, I found that he’d taken notes in felt-tip pen of precisely where and when he’d seen each bird.

I never paid much attention to this peculiar birdwatching habit: I didn’t see the point. Birds were always just part of the scenery, hanging around in the background. They were nice, but far less important than studying, socializing, or going to the mall. Why should I bother to learn their names?

My dismissive attitude towards birds and birdwatching continued for nearly 20 years. I lived in cities for most of that time, where everything was too loud and too busy to even notice birds. Birdwatching, when I thought of it at all, seemed like a hobby for “old people:” people who had time on their hands, pricey binoculars around their necks, floppy-brimmed hats on their heads, and chunky hiking boots on their feet.

Change began gradually, after our family moved to Vermont. I can pinpoint the moment my interest in birds shifted: I was walking the dog, and I heard a mockingbird call. I didn’t know it was a mockingbird at the time, but I recognized the sad, haunting call as something that I’d heard often during the long, lazy afternoons of my childhood. When I got home, I looked it up. Now I knew one bird.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.