Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [102]
In the morning the fog is so thick I can hardly see the old granary across the yard. One by one I put the chickens into the tractor, then latch the trapdoor behind them. Leaning into the rope, I pull them onto a patch of green grass, and within seconds they are scratching and pecking like it’s all they’ve ever done. Similar to the pigs—all their life in a plastic wading pool with wood shavings, and they know immediately what to do when put in contact with the earth. I lift some rocks and find a pair of angleworms. When I toss them in, the carnage is immediate. I go to the garden and pluck a couple of potato bugs—we’ve had a heavy infestation this year—but am disappointed when the chickens ignore them. We could use some potato-bug-eating chickens. Then one of the birds stretches, one leg and one wing back in the manner of a ballet dancer warming up before the barre, and I straighten and stand back just to watch for a while. It’s dead calm here, the grass wet green, everything cottoned in stillness by the fog, nothing visible except a hazy semicircle of yard, half our house, and there in the middle of that yard, our chickens. When I return to the house, I meet Anneliese coming out.
We turn and stand together on the steps, looking at the scene. We have chickens. I move behind and put my arms around my wife, beautiful in one of my old flannel shirts.
Baby, I tell her, another dream has come true.
I am joking mostly, but standing there on our little patch with Anneliese in my arms, I hear the snap of the flag we are flying beside the driveway on this, the fourth day of July, and I think we have been blessed with a lovely little dream indeed.
All day I work in the office with a clear view to the chickens below. Up here in my swivel chair, I feel like a rancher of old, surveying my entire operation: two pigs, twelve chickens, one guinea pig (Amy puts him outside to graze). The fog burned off by mid-morning, and now it’s a fine day, peppered by the sound of a few early starters shooting off fireworks. Anneliese and I watched the chickens for a good while this morning, and I have gone down several times to move the tractor and feed them bread crumbs from our pig bakery stash. I throw in some windfall apples, but after a few tentative pecks they ignore them as they did the potato bugs. Later I will learn that if I slice the apples in half, they’ll eat them quite well. When Anneliese brings Jane out and parks her stroller beside the chicken tractor, Jane regards the birds gravely and at great length, her chin tucked so that a second chin pops out. This is a mix-and-match batch—Black Australorp, Buff Orpington, White Rock, Speckled Sussex, Rhode Island Red, Partridge Rock, Barred Rock, Golden Laced Wyandotte—and they are relishing their relative freedom, every now and then exploding into short-lived but aggressive bursts of flight, and sometimes sprinting from one end of the pen to the other.
When evening comes with a storm threatening, I put the chicks back in the pump house. Amy’s timothy is in there, boxed up and stacked for winter, and at the smell of it all my hay-making memories flood back. The sense of accomplishment when the hay was all baled, the wagons all emptied, the field all stubble. When I step outside into the lowering light, I remember how it felt to stack the last bale in the mow and to slide down the elevator rails, through the cool night air.
I hope I’m not working my poor daughter just to work her. I hold out hope that there are long-term benefits in assigning a child tasks that don’t pay off with an immediate Dilly Bar. And while this life we are trying for here is a far cry from real farming, it does present opportunities for edification. This sort of thing can easily be overdone. I think of childhood friends who came to school only after several hours of choring, and how they were essentially unpaid help. And then there is the other lesson, the one that Anneliese is better at drawing out than I am—that not all tasks are completed on your own behalf. One late-summer evening I remember