Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [139]
The backbeat of this year—and it’s laid in there deep, you have to listen for it—is that I am trying to do too much, and I’m not the one paying for it. I haven’t cooked a meal with my wife in months. The pantry is full with home canning, and I spent maybe four hours in the garden. The division of labor has become nigh unto no division at all. When my dad was milking all those cows, I still used to see him grab a broom and sweep the kitchen now and then. Lately Anneliese has been doing work as a freelance translator, and when I see her dressed up and leaving the house in a professional capacity I am simultaneously proud and ashamed that I may be depriving her of more of that. In short, I want to be a better husband and a better father, and the most meaningful progress in that direction requires me to do one simple thing: Be There; or better yet, Be Here.
This morning when I go out to feed the chickens, my boots leave a swipe of tracks through the frost. Soon I’ll have to rig a deal to keep the chickens’ water from freezing, and hang a lightbulb on a timer for the worst winter nights. The coop is still unpainted, and I have yet to nail up the trim boards Mills cut to fit the eaves. The structure itself is sitting solid, but just as Buffalo and I placed it, it remains tipped a good bit off plumb. One local wag refers to it as the Leaning Tower of Poultry. When I pull the door open—the door it took me six tries to get right on Mills’s scorching blacktop that day—there are the six multicolored ladies, beadily blinking and ready for the day. I scoop fresh feed into a feeder fashioned from two scraps of plywood tacked in a vee between a pair of one-by-four boards (a rare carpentry triumph—I found the instructions in a library book) and replenish their water. While the chickens dip and peck I raid the nesting boxes. Dad built the boxes one day when I was feeling especially behind, and then he and Amy hung them.
There are three eggs this morning, two of them warm. Likely there will be one or two more by the afternoon, as lately we’ve been nearing consistently peak production. I drop one of the miniature doors open and the surviving Barred Rock pokes her head out first. When I look back just before going into the house, three of the hens are out, tilting their heads curiously at the frost.
And then it’s out of the cold air and into the warm air of the kitchen, and the sound of bacon in the pan. I sure liked having those pigs around, but Bob the One-Eyed Beagle and his crew cure that bacon slow and smoke it with real wood, and at first whiff all residual reservations vaporize. Anneliese is frying potatoes and onions in a cast iron pan. I dice up some tomatoes and garlic, and while they sauté I whip the eggs for scrambling. Amy is setting the table, and Jane is burbling in her baby seat. The ceiling fan in the living room is pushing the heat from the woodstove back to the floor and into the kitchen. We sit down in our small circle for a breakfast in which everything but the salt, pepper, and olive oil came to the table by our own hand. Here we are in the slantways house, the fire warm, our plates full, our chickens tiptoeing from their crooked coop out there on the hill.
EPILOGUE
Before our family grew large, my brother John and I shared the north bedroom of the farmhouse. The town road ran north-south past the garden, and at night the headlights of southbound cars pushed through the windows and slid across the plaster. A shifting rectangle of light would appear on the wall beyond the foot of my bed, pass slowly to the right, then bend around the corner and work back toward the