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“All is well on Greenwood Farm,” Mama wrote in her journal on October 27, 1971. “Apple storage almost completed; canning completed (over 300 quarts); cabbage in; apples being dried; cheese making started (with rennet and sour cream to activate); and still eating fresh strawberries from the garden!

“It seems I’m pregnant, due May 28, 1972.”

Then on November 2: “I made seven wheels of goat cheese weighing two–four pounds each. Some had cumin and caraway seed, and some were plain. All were rubbed with sesame oil and salt to form a rind and then scraped and bathed with vinegar and salt to keep mold down.”

Mama didn’t mention the miscarriage. She’d found a four-leaf clover a couple days before it happened, always a sign of good luck, so she told herself that maybe it was the right thing; perhaps the baby was not healthy enough. She’d been working so hard, it was likely she didn’t have enough nutrients left over for the baby to form correctly. But none of those thoughts mattered to her body. It was in mourning. All that blood, gone now.

“I feel very alienated to most women in town,” Mama wrote. “Here I am a woman at the peak of reproduction and child bearing and cannot talk about it to anyone.”

I must have felt her sadness, and my own. I really wanted a friend. Mama read me a story about a fledgling bird that fell from its nest and went around asking the other animals, “Are you my mother?” I was like that bird, but I went around asking, “Will you be my friend?”

“Be my friends?” I asked the chickens. They clucked and nodded.

We had about a dozen hens and one rooster. The rooster had a red wattle on his head like a wound and liked to crew and strut his iridescent tail feathers. Some of the hens were pale beige, some speckled brown and white, one brownish, others black. They taught me to roll in the dust to get clean. Brownie was my favorite, friendly and gossipy. She told me she would always be my friend.

We collected eggs from the coop and the secret places where the grass was matted by the shape of the hens’ bodies. Most eggs were tan and perfectly shaped, like magic stones with speckles and rough bumps in the shell, but the bantams’ were pale blue, like robins’ eggs. When I held a blue egg in the palms of my cupped hands, it felt so hard and strong, like nothing could break it, but I knew that the littlest drop or bump would turn it into a sticky mess of slippery clear bled into by yellow yolk. The shattered egg was nothing so strong after all.

Every once in a while a fox would get one of the hens.

“I guess the fox needs to eat, too,” Papa said, but it sure made him mad. As replacement, we’d let some of the eggs hatch, and I’d thrill to find the chicks lying under the mother like feathered eggs.

At first Mama and Papa loved having fresh eggs. “Look at the difference in color between our yolks and the pale store-bought ones,” Papa said to Mama. “Ours are a rich orange. Makes you think how much better your human eggs must be, eating a good diet, compared to the eggs of other women eating junk.”

“Maybe I miscarried because I wasn’t getting enough vitamin E,” Mama said in reply. She kept hidden the fear that the hard work might have also been the cause. She didn’t want Papa to think she couldn’t hack it.

The Nearings didn’t eat eggs and didn’t believe in keeping animals of any kind, and after a while Mama and Papa began to wonder if it was good to eat eggs, not only because the Nearings disapproved but also because the chickens were more mouths to feed in the lean months of winter. Then one day, just like that, Papa packed up the chickens into crates and gave them away.

Later when I thought of the chickens, one of those rare pale blue eggs rose up into my throat. The chickens had been part of our family, and the egg in my throat was the feeling of something missing. It was hard and smooth and heavy, but also so fragile it might break and make me cry. It was the feeling of growing out of a favorite shirt, milk