Games for Adults and Children

Leda, brilliant granddaughter, knows many things but thus far in her six+ years on earth she has learned nothing about horse racing. Given that she didn’t spawn from racing families, that she doesn’t live in Kentucky, and that she not (yet) developed a taste for bourbon, this is not surprising. But CSB, who likewise does not live in Kentucky, has always loved watching the Kentucky Derby, because his father did, and that is enough to constitute a tradition. And now with Leda inquiring assiduously into the silken attire of the jockeys, and the role of a muddy racetrack, and the amount of money involved, that tradition is launched for another generation. I had threatened CSB that Leda and I would gather round the TV screen wearing large floppy hats adorned with wildflowers. But we failed in that key element of the tradition, due to barely turning on the television by post time. (6:30 is early to be coming inside to watch TV, when it is still light outside and there are still seeds to be sown and weeds to be pulled and chickens to be fed.) But we did manage to gather. The horses paraded with their jockeys. Or the jockeys paraded with their horses. There was exactly one female jockey and exactly one African-American jockey. The gun went off. The horses shot out of the gate and stuck together, all except for Orb, in 16th place. We anticipated Normandy Invasion (why not Fallujah Offensive?) would win the war. Then Orb leapt ahead, and in 2:02.89 minutes, the race was over. Leda wanted to know what a horse would do with $2 million.

I know that Angry Birds is entertaining and satisfying in certain atavistic ways, but still, there is nothing like Hangman for enlarging one’s vocabulary while getting re-acquainted with the alphabet. So, as Leda and I took Metro-North into Grand Central yesterday – where we would rendezvous with her Dad for the handover – I taught her to play Hangman. She was a natural. For her first turn as the Hanged, she guessed letters in alphabetical order, which is not a good idea.(And it would never happen again.) She would have lost but we negotiated several extra body parts & accessories for the hanging body: barrettes, striped socks, ears, knee caps. She took a turn and stumped me with POOP. I should have guessed – known, remembered - where a six-year-old’s mind would turn, but I regret to say I was genuinely stumped. I too would have lost the game & given up the ghost, had she not given my hanging body a crown, and then a sword, and then a handbag. Then she insisted that since I very nearly lost, she would take a second turn making up the word. Nearly losing would trump taking alternate turns, she explained. I methodically guessed the vowels first. By U I was already mostly dead. Then I guessed consonants while wracking my mind for words I knew she could spell. That was foolish. Because she can spell more words than I can name, and because once again I failed at the obvious. The word was BUTT. By then we were pulling into the station, which was a good thing.

Later that day, the downstairs bathtub was returned to us, to the human bathers of the house. Because yes, CSB finished constructing their outdoor home: a separate fenced-in play area and a large wooden box that looks unnervingly like a cheap coffin. We carried them outside one by one, their wings a-flutter, their hearts a-beating. This morning they are still out there, in a scrum at the open door of their casket, deciding whether to make the giant leap onto grass.

R.I.P. Bump

It seems like too classic a henhouse story. The fox swoops in and nabs the hen, then trots off gaily as the other hens cluck and squawk.
And we thought we had been so careful. Each evening around 4 pm we’ve put the dogs inside the house, in a room with no view of the backyard and henhouse, and then we’ve opened the gate so that all the chickens can roam free and pluck grubs and bugs from virgin grass and generally behave like animals in a farmyard. Then as it gets dark they head back to their cozy henhouse and gather for their nightcaps. We come in and count, and shut the door for the evening.
But not today. Around 4:30 I heard a squawking of a different tenor. It was agitated, staccato, and distressed. I dashed out the door and directly in front of me, just as perfect as an illustration from Aesop’s*, was a gorgeous red fox with Bump between his foxy jaws. Of all the chickens, why did it have to be poor Bump? She was our very first hatchling from the exotic eggs Anne Farrell gave us. We didn’t know what we were getting. She could have been anything and she was a Crevecoeur, all black and with a perfect Mohawk/Fro. She was the matriarch of them all.
And now, fox fodder.
Meanwhile all the chickens are back in the henhouse and we have counted them countless times to assure ourselves that it was only Bump we lost. Have you ever tried counting agitated chickens? It is challenging, but on the other hand I am glad that in my life I have on several occasions counted chickens, and I actually think I am getting better at it.
This is what the fox looked like:

And this was Bump last fall, in her youth:
*As far as I recall, in Aesop's Fables you will find a fox and grapes, a fox and a crow, and a fox with a hedgehog, but nothing about a fox trotting off with a hen between his jaws. Why is this? My guess: there is no moral to the tale.

The new chickens (born April 22nd to be exact)are starting to lay, and notice how much smaller their eggs are. The Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpingtons are laying brown,buff and mottled white eggs, while the Araucanas are laying sky blue eggs. Numero Uno granddaughter continues to expect a green yolk inside a blue egg. One day I hope to oblige.

Civic duty

This is what I did on Friday. I do not think anyone is really interested, but I have this desperate need to justify those interminable hours on the third floor of the county courthouse.
But first: before I left the house, an ungrateful chicken escaped the lovely henhouse while the intrepid CSB was letting them into their yard and giving them their breakfast treats. She headed for the hills, the woods, freedom and Broadway, and despite our calling, lurching, beseeching and beckoning, despite my very appealing plaid (Black Watch) pajamas, she would not be caught.
Did she realize how vulnerable she is to the world and its predators? Did she realize there is a red-tailed hawk out there polishing his curved beak in anticipation of chicken tartar for lunch?

I drive to the county courthouse to report for Day #2 of Jury Duty. Thus far, I am one of 90+ citizens who answered the summons and now sit on hard wooden benches while the judge and attorneys execute voir dire. If voir dire takes this long for a piddling drug case, then I tremble to think what transpires in a big case.
I park beneath the White Plains library and put lots of change into a parking meter. Then I realize that this is a 1-hour meter and I need to park in a 12-hour meter spots, so I bid adieu to those swallowed quarters and move my car far into the bowels of the parking lot, and feed every last bit of change I have into the meter, until I finally buy myself 71/2 hours of parking.
Inside the courthouse I pay 75¢ for hot water, so I can make a cup o’ tea. The clerk is blind and has several earrings. He never smiles.
At 9:35 we file in and take our seats in courtroom #304. The bailiff with a chevron mustache takes roll call, in random order. We all respond to our garbled names, and then we wait. I do the Friday crossword, but struggle with the city on the Niagara Escarpment, because I have never heard of the Niagara Escarpment,** though it seems like a place I might want to visit.
There are 18 potential jurors seated in the juror box on the left. They are the ones being questioned, for now. The rest of us watch, listen, surreptitiously text, and do the crossword.
At 10:10 we all get up and go into the hall to wait.
At 10:30 we return to the courtroom.
The judge* picks up where he stopped yesterday, with questions 10 – 15 on the juror questionnaire. He takes every opportunity to repeat, verbatim, his exhortation that the chosen jurors must interpret the law according to his diktat, and not consult with one’s brother-in-law the attorney, or base a judgment on the character of one’s former husband the Yonkers policeman. Can you do that? He asks, again and again. When the answer is, I think so, or I will try, the judge repeats his question until he gets the desired answer. I find this technique fondly reminiscent of my son’s 5-year old belief that if he repeated his request enough times, I would change my answer to the affirmative.
The Assistant DA, who will prosecute the case, asks of the empaneled 18: You all have common sense, don’t you? Can you use your common sense? To my chagrin, no one answers with a resounding no.
11:00 we all file out of the courtroom for a 5-minute recess.
11:15 we all file back into the courtroom. The Asst. DA continues his questioning with these zingers: Can you be fair? Do you understand the concept of reasonable doubt, which has been explained no less than 8 times this morning? Again, sadly, no one answers no.

11:40 we all file out again.
11:55 the gum-chewing policewoman calls us all back into the courtroom.
The mustachioed bailiff calls out the 5 lucky chosen jurors. The liberated 13 skip out of the courtroom.
The bailiff spins his bingo basket and calls out 18 more names. But not mine. The 18 take their places in the jury box. Now, as we have done with the previous 2 batches of 18, we hear their vital statistics as they respond to questions 1 through 9 on the juror questionnaire. I now know the name, birthplace, education, marital status, occupation, number of children and the ages and whereabouts of those children, of 54 fellow citizens. I also know who among them has been the victim of, or witness to, or party to, a crime; I know which of their close relatives or friends, and in some cases, their not very close relatives or friends, has been a victim of a crime. I know about the pediatrician whose identity was stolen. I know about the mother–of-3 from Bedford who was sexually assaulted as a teenager. I heard from the young man who was attacked because of his race. When prodded, one woman says that yes, her best friend was murdered, but that was in Bulgaria. Does a murder in Bulgaria count? In this courtroom, of course it does, and please give us details. One fellow, a sales manager, was at his best friend’s apartment when there was a drug bust. I heard about the young woman’s ex-boyfriend who is in jail now on drug charges. The judge remarks on the wisdom of this fellow being an ex. He laughs at his own humor. Another upright soul asserts that he was arrested years ago for unlawful possession of marijuana, “for which I am not ashamed”, he says. Thereby assuring that he will not be gracing this jury. We hear the complicated story of a woman’s brother in Texas whose neighbor shot a bow and arrow into his house and pierced his refrigerator. Charges were not filed, because they were all good friends.

I wonder how the chickens are enjoying this fine weather, as I am not. For the sake of the escapee, I am grateful it is not as cold as yesterday.

12:50 we break for lunch. We are enjoined to return promptly at 2:15
I go to the local diner and read the paper. It too is full of crime. There is the Russian mobster who was convicted of killing and chopping up people in order to steal their identities. Their body parts were found in a New Jersey Nature preserve.
A 57-year-old mother stabbed her 38-year-old son to death. He had cerebral palsy. I pay special attention to their ages, as her age is close to mine, but she bred at a much earlier age, 19 to be exact.
A Russian citizen, who is in prison on arms-dealing charges, has filed complaints because he cannot get a proper vegetarian diet in prison. His wife says he is forced to survive on eggs and tea made with tepid tap water.
A long Island man who murdered a motivational speaker claims that the man hired him to “do a Kevorkian”.
It is a very nice diner, with actual jukeboxes in every booth. I would play some Neil Sedaka, but all my small change was fed into the maw of the parking meter underground.
I worry about the AWOL chicken back home. Has she been eviscerated by a hawk? Is she quaking with fear underneath the back porch? Or is she roosting in an adjacent tree mocking her sisters?

2:15 the jury pool are milling around the hallway outside courtroom #304.
2:35 we are called back in.
The judge continues questioning the 18 empaneled. He is on Question #13: Are you or is anyone related to you an attorney, a policeman or in the military?
We learn whose father, brother, nephew, cousin is an attorney and what kind of attorney they are. We learn who is related to a detective in the NYPD and what kind of cases he works on: mostly drugs.
Question #14 is: Do you have any moral or religious reason that would prevent you from passing judgment in this courtroom?
No one answers yes. My hopes are dashed, yet again.
Question #15: Is there anything else you want to tell us?
Yes, I am scheduled for a root canal and I really don’t want to miss the appointment, says empanelled person #7. Judge repeats for the 4th time today his parable – of which he is so clearly proud – of how, if the world continued to function after the assassination of JFK, then surely the world will continue to function while person X performs his civic duty, completely missing the point that person #7 apparently would rather get a root canal than stay in this judge’s courtroom. Juror #14 explains that she is scheduled to go a business trip first thing Monday morning. The judge repeats his parable in full.
No one expresses concern about her chickens running amok in her absence, but that is what I am worried about.
2:55 we all exit the courtroom while the judge speaks privately with the jurors who are unwilling (wisely in my opinion) to share their traumatic life experiences with a roomful of strangers.

I could be chasing a chicken now. Instead I am pacing the third floor hallway, counting my steps. No I am not OCD.

3:30 we all return to the courtroom and sit while the Asst. DA and defense attorney repeat their earlier performances.
4:00 exeunt omnes.
4:45 we all enter the courtroom. The names of the 5 chosen jurors are called. The magic number of 12 plus 2 alternates has been achieved. The rest are dismissed. The relief is palpable. Those friendships forged in the waiting outside courtroom #304 disappear like contrails.

*This judge, in his why-we-should-all-be grateful-to-serve on-a-jury-in-this-great country spiel, informed us that we – the assembled Westchester-ites - were not in Libya or Bahrain this week, but instead were rolling out of bed and heading to our yoga classes, and aren't we the lucky ones? This was addressed to a group of 90+ people that included old and young men and women, medical salesmen, contractors, nurses, a neuro- physicist, retired FBI agents, a somewhat humorous writer, landscapers, and high-school cafeteria workers, among others. I later discovered that I was not the only one insulted and not a little outraged by his condescending and completely inapt generalizations.

**Hamilton, Ontario.

Discovering the pecking order

When honorable-son-in-business-school first asked me if we would be fitting our chickens with contact lenses, I laughed, and very wittily answered that we would do just that right after they got their hair extensions.
“Seriously, Mom”, said honorable-son. “You mock, but they really exist; we did a case study on the company that developed them, and they will solve your pecking problems.”
“What pecking problems?”
That was then. This is now. Obviously I have heard of a pecking order, and being well versed etymologically, I knew from whence the expression came. But knowing an expression’s provenance is not remotely the same as experiencing it, intimately, daily in the chicken coop. Yes, our chickens peck each other, and the chickens at the top of the order peck the ones lower down the order. This order is, so we have learned, determined by their combs and their perception of combs, and this is where the contact lenses come in. A while back a farmer’s chickens developed cataracts. He separated the afflicted fowl from the rest of the flock, and called the vet. Together, they noticed that the chickens with cataracts were markedly less peckish and cannibalistic than his chickens with 20-20 vision. So instead of seeking to cure the cataract-chickens, they wondered how they could similarly afflict the whole lot of them.
You cannot actually give the chickens cataracts, but with red-tinted contact lenses you can reproduce the effects of cataracts, and their behavior will improve. A trained crew can insert lenses in 225 chickens per hour. We don’t have 225 chickens, and we aren’t trained. Sometimes it takes us several minutes to catch one chicken. And I gave up wearing contact lenses myself about 20 years ago because I became so impatient inserting them each morning.
For the Hens of Hastings, I am considering red-tinted spectacles on elastic bands.
Perhaps if they had all been wearing glasses, Wanda would not have met her untimely end, de-feathered and pecked by her roommates. It was while we were lamenting her death early this morning that Joanna, who is Polish, asked CSB if we ever feed our hens bread. He said that I sometimes do. And it’s true that on Wednesday when I made crust-less cucumber sandwiches for the Ladies Literature Club, I gave the crusts to the hens, and this somewhat mollified my normal guilt feelings about wasting all that good crust. I once tried serving cucumber sandwiches with crusts, but it was not a success; connoisseurs of cucumber sandwiches (such as CSB) are adamant that crusts have no place in a proper one. According to Joanna, her sister back in Poland does not give her chickens old bread because it is bad for their livers. She said it was the acid in bread that bothered their livers, but I think – from her rising gestures - she meant the yeast. English is not her first language.
Just a few minutes later Gill called to tell me that she read an article about a chef who asserts the secret of making great pasta is using Italian eggs because they have the most orange yolks. And Gill, who frequents Italy, concurs that Italian egg yolks are significantly more orange than even our newly laid eggs. So the question is: what are the Italian chickens eating?
And do they wear contact lenses?

The Pecking Order

Naturally you have all heard of the pecking order. We seem to have the pecking order – more pecking than order- made manifest in the henhouse these days.
You surely recall Bump? Bump was one of the first to hatch from our initial batch of 25 beautiful eggs from Annie Farrell. The Hoffman boys kept them in an incubator behind the couch in their octagonal room in which they watch Notre Dame football games on a big screen TV. Fifteen eggs hatched. An astounding 10 of them turned out to be roosters and hence made their way to Yonkers, leaving us with 5 hens, of which Bump is clearly the most remarkable.
Even before we knew Bump was a she, we knew she was special. She has a topknot, a pompadour, a frizzy Mohawk, a vertical hairdo, a beautiful black crest. She is a Crevecoeur, a breed developed by the French (mais oui) from Polish stock (the same poignant Polish sensibility that sent their cavalry to face the German Panzer Division in WWI). And like the cavalry, Crevecoeurs are now an endangered breed.

A couple of days ago CSB noticed a raw patch on Bump’s back, just in front of that spot where her tail makes its elegant swerve to the vertical. Clearly Bump was being picked on and pecked at.
We went to our poultry bible, Raising Chickens for Dummies, and found this disheartening explanation:
“Chickens are conscious of colors and patterns, and they often pick on a bird that has different coloring, color patterns of feathering than the majority breed…Chickens with topknots are frequently picked on by other types of chickens.”
In other words, chickens can be bullies.
I consulted Butler’s to see if anything in the life of Saint Brigid, the patron saint of chicken farmers, could prove helpful in this matter. No. She is also the patron of milkmaids, bastards, poets and printing presses, and seems to have lavished all her patronly wisdom on them.
Now we are considering slathering Bump’s exposed posterior with honey, which is antibacterial and has great healing qualities. CSB is worried that the other hens will redouble their bullying when they discover how sweet the honey is.
I am considering arnica.

R.I.P. Patty Plymouth Rock

It is completely illogical if you take the trouble to look twice. Don’t I eat chicken on a regular basis? I am excessively fond of curried chicken, I also dote on coq au vin and chicken soup with quinoa; I would walk a mile for good chicken molé. I like chicken korma and chicken Marengo and Moroccan lemon chicken. Tarragon chicken was a childhood favorite, which reminds me: why hasn’t my mother cooked it lately?
All of the above chickens were undeniably dead when I cooked and ate them.
So why the lamentations, the gnashing of teeth, the tearing of hair and rending of garments?
Oh, woe, our first dead chicken.
But, as CSB gently reminded me, it was far from our first. What about all those roosters dispatched to a stewpot in Yonkers? Don’t they count? Wasn’t the strutting, tootling Alonso the very first of our chickens to die? Is it their maleness, their testosterone-laden morning alarums, that disqualifies them from being the object of mourning?
When I examine my reactions, it is hard not to infer a certain gynocentric-favoritism.

It came about thus:
Friday morning I visited the chickens and saw one of the Plymouth Rocks perched atop a cross beam, her rump facing my direction. She was trying with all her might to push out an egg and she was not having an easy time of it. I sympathized, as any mother would. The egg was about a third of the way out, and covered with blood. With effort, she would push it out farther and then several other hens, below her on the ground, would peck at the emerging egg. I shooed away the annoying harpies, while the laboring hen pushed and the egg came out further, then receded back into her bloody cloaca. I stroked her back and tried to make encouraging and midwifey cooing sounds. Other hens came around to bother. I stroked her and nudged them away. Finally she expelled the bloody egg, hopped off the perch, shat and wandered away.
About an hour later I returned and found her inside the chicken house, supine and dead on a nest of fresh wood shavings in the far corner beneath the nesting boxes. Other hens stood around showing varying degrees of lack of interest. I wrapped her in an old white sheet and put her in the garden shed, because I was about to leave for Linwood and wouldn’t have time to bury her, and I certainly could not leave her with her cannibalistic brethren, that is, her sistren.
Poor thing. Our first dead chicken, I thought melodramatically.
All afternoon, as I drove in my shiny new red car towards tree peonies and dairy farms and the Soaring Capital of America, I considered the brief life of our Barred Plymouth Rock, she who, at one-day-old, arrived at our local post office and come to live with us, along with a dozen other chicks, presumably her siblings, but not necessarily.

My face grew red and blotchy, my eyes became puffy and itchy and my skin tingled and prickled. Even I began to see this was an overreaction to a pullet’s demise. After all, such is nature.
It turns out I am allergic to my new car. After considering and rejecting several other theories, it became clear that the only possible cause for such bodily disruptions was the new car, with its Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) exhaling and out-gassing.
And yes, if you Google new car allergy, you will find that I am far from the first person to have identified this syndrome. But I may be the first to have initially confused the symptoms with chicken grief.

Literature and Chickens

In a letter to James Thurber, one of the funniest men ever to put pen to paper, E.B. White, no slouch himself, wrote: “I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.” I would concur with his confusion.
If you want to read that sentence again, you can walk along 41st Street between Madison and Fifth Avenue, a block known as Library Way, and look down. There are many other pertinent and pithy quotes embedded in the sidewalk, but you can understand why this one jumped out at me, and clucked.
It seems we embarked on this chicken venture in complete ignorance. I read The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald, about adventures on a chicken farm in Washington state in the 1930’s; and we wandered through the poultry tents at county fairs coveting the silkies, and thought we were ready. Or I did.
Then Annie F. gave us 25 eggs and the Hoffman boys incubated them. Fifteen hatched and if you’ve been reading for a while, you already know how many were roosters. So we ordered 15 more hens, guaranteed to have ovaries.
CSB built a beautiful chicken house (only slightly unfinished and still in need of the electrician) and we bought a copy of Chickens for Dummies. I also bought a Field Guide to chicken breeds so I could wonder what breeds we have. Which is not as simple as it sounds. A crest and a beard may be the defining characteristics of a Crevecouer, but so are leaden blue toes and Bump’s toes are more of a slate blue. Then there is the matter of Mamacita’s weird comb.
I mention Bump and Mamacita because as far as I can tell, those are the only two laying hens we have thus far. I have seen them both, at various times, brooding in the roosting boxes, but I have not seen them actually lay the eggs.
In the law I think this would be referred to as circumstantial evidence.

In addition to the Decapitation of Saints Cosmas and Damien, and the Naval papers of the Quasi War between France and the US that I pass by en route to the powder room, one of the great benefits of having an office is that I am not tempted to visit the chicken house every hour to see if any more eggs have been laid. This is what I did all last weekend, and I am sad to report that my eagerness did not seem to enhance egg formation.
As for which is more discouraging, literature or chickens, they are neck and neck, wattle to wattle, beak to beak.

BACK FROM THE ARCTIC

I did not eat my boots, but I did eat muktuk (seal or whale blubber), and you will not be surprised to learn that there is a local Inuit rhyme to be chanted by all initiates into the delicacy of muktuk, making use of every possible rhyme with the final syllable of MUKTUK.
Because there is more than I can say in one breath about the Arctic and because I could not blog from the Arctic, I plan to spend the next few days blogging AS IF from the Arctic. Even though I am sitting here in the temperate zone comfort of home, back with beloved CSB, dogs who would strenuously object to pulling a dog sled across the frozen ice, lazy chickens and recalcitrant bees, the conceit is that I am aboard the Lyubov Orlova, a Soviet era Russian icebreaker named for a Russian film star. She was best known – and beloved – for her roles in such Stalinist classics as Volga Volga; Engineer Kochin’s Error, and The Circus, in which an American circus performer (Lyubov Orlova) gives birth to a black baby and is shunned by the racist Americans, so she decamps to the USSR where she and her black son are embraced by the Soviets. The movie climaxes with a rousing lullaby medley sung by all the happy ethnic groups of the Soviet Union.

Parenthetically, here at home, the chickens have started laying. This is very exciting. However there is some concern there they are not very bright chickens since they (or maybe just one she) are laying on the straw covered floor of the coop, rather than in their roomy and stylish roosting boxes built by CSB himself. So far, she is not falling for the golf ball ruse.

Farm News

But first, the results of the Heater Hunting Quiz:
2 of you voted for A. Wrong.
5 of you voted for B (shooting from a warm car along Hole in the Wall Road) – and you were CORRECT.
6 of you voted for C, a drinking game at Ralph Heater’s Pub - and I was gratified because I thought it was a very clever game. One suggestion was to use beer soaked spitballs in the straw shooters for extra flavor in the baked potato. BUT WRONG.
1 of you voted for D, which wasn’t even an option.

I thank you all.

And now the Farm News:
The bees are bringing in bright yellow pollen from the super tall sunflowers.
This should come as no surprise.
Even more interesting was to watch the bees (along with yellowjackets, bumble bees and even pollinating flies) collecting nectar from the porcelain berry flowers.
The porcelain berry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata )has overgrown much of the field. At first I thought it was Wild Grape (Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris ) but it is not, because in fact Wild Grape looks a lot like a cultivated grape, and also is edible, which porcelain berry is not. Unless you are a bee. Then I thought it might be Jewelweed (a puzzling member of the Impatiens genus of the Balsaminiceae family), which is very good for alleviating the pain and itch of poison ivy. But it is not; jewel berry has a small yellow or orange flower that looks almost orchid-like.
My brain just wasn’t coming up with the right name. Then CSB suggested I Google “invasive vine on the Saw Mill Parkway” and ta-da, the porcelain berry it is. Extremely invasive, and having no merits except this important one: the bees love it in late August.

In Clucker Hall, the chickens are getting plumper and plumber. In order to encourage egg production (any day or week now) someone suggested placing a wooden egg in their nesting box to give them the right idea. I couldn’t find any wooden eggs in the pantry, but I did find three colored marble eggs that my grandmother used for some arcane purpose now forgotten. So I gingerly nestled them in the pine shavings lining the nesting boxes, and we await the big ovarian moment.

The less said about Dodder ( Cuscata and Grammica), the better.

Departures

I did not count my chickens before they hatched. But I did count on chickens.
The latter was clearly no less foolish than the former. We incubated 25 eggs and 15 lovely exotic chicks emerged. When they were about a month old it became clear we had a rooster in the henhouse, Alonso. Alonso crowed his lonely doodle mornings and evenings. Eventually he was joined by Attila, and soon the duet went to Yonkers. Once they had departed, Tux started crowing and a while later he was joined by Snowflake. They too went to Yonkers to grace a stewpot. Once they were departed yet another rooster started crowing, a shy black and white thing (to remain unnamed for obvious reasons) that had not previously emitted a peep. And another and a third. About 2 weeks later they were named Sopa, Empanada and Rosti-Pollo.
Only then, in our depleted henhouse, did yet another rooster proclaim his masculinity, only then did he trumpet the testosterone flowing through his avian veins. He has handsome too, with a black and white striped scarf and iridescent green feathering.
He’s now gone, with 2 more cohorts. So from 15 eggs that hatched, we are left with 5 chickens of the hen-variety. And that is wishful thinking.

Alternative titles:
And No Cock Crew
With one Fell Swoop, from the Harem to the Nunnery
All's Quiet in the Henhouse
They Call me Sopa

Don't read this if you want to be amused

First we picnicked on the green lawn & I figured Caramoor must be watering its lawns because our lawn at home is brown as the dust that gathers in the hollow footprints in the basement floor. We dined on cucumber soup, pasta with pesto, lemon chicken and blueberry cafloutis. It was my first cafloutis ever and I was rather pleased with it. Based on that vast experience, I have determined that it is the ideal baked fruit dessert for the non-baker. We were most distinctly not dressed for Glyndebourne, but we weren’t too shabby. Then we ambled across the very green lawns to the white tent, to hear Norma performed in the Venetian theatre. It was about 100˚. We wore the bare minimum for decency and vigorously fanned ourselves with the program. Up on the stage the conductor wore tails, the men wore tuxes, the sopranos wore long gowns and they all sang their hearts out. I waited for someone to faint, but the only expiring last night was Norma’s final act.

All my favorite operas end with death, destruction, and fairly universal misery. That beautiful music, the soaring heart-rending arias, the architecturally perfect duets, the rousing choruses; they all lead ineluctably to the final act when we realize, again and again, that even great love cannot alter the trajectory to the bloodletting and sorrow and eternal regret.
So, given that operatic epiphany - that there is no happy ending possible - I had an especially bad night contemplating the ex-wife locked inside her paranoia more securely than the gold in Fort Knox, & obsessively blaming CSB because she divorced him. Alas, she is more like Medea than Norma, though all possible endings are tragic.

But today is another scorcher, and the lawn continues to be brown.

There are so many great things about having kids that I just can’t begin to name them all.
I can however name one aspect of parenthood I dreaded & dread still: the dreaded ritual of Kid Birthday Parties. Whether at home or at a bowling alley (they used to be quite popular, in fact, were it not for birthday parties, most bowling alleys would go out of business) they involve many children of the same age crazed on sugared food, the birthday child in question having a panic attack, parents who wish they were anywhere else, and at least one accident.
So you may well ask, why am I so looking forward to tomorrow’s birthday party for the beloved grandchild who is now 4, to be held in our own backyard, also home to the brown lawn, 2 dogs, 3 fewer chickens* than yesterday and thousands upon thousands of bees?
Actually, I am looking forward to its ending, when all the guests are gone and we are left with plates smeared with birthday cake from which all the frosting has been licked off.
Not only will this birthday party feature several 4 year old in hula skirts (that is the good part), but there will be a newborn baby, the boyfriend of my daughter (mother of the birthday child, Princess Bowie) and his parents whom I have never met before, and my ex-husband who has hitherto made a policy of insisting on CSB's nonattendance at family events and whose last communication with me involved a snarky letter to the local paper. I am fearful that this will relegate six-year-old boys’ projectile vomiting to its proper place as a benign annoyance.

I am capitulating to some atavistic thirst, and turning on the sprinklers.

*Adios Fez, OJ and Buffy. Gone to Yonkers.

On the chicken front

First we thought there were many roosters among the chickens (Annie F perceived several masculine features in the photos we sent her) but only Alonso crowed and so we thought he was the only one. Until a week ago when Alonso got competition. Attila (an opera by Verdi) started challenging Alonso's coop supremacy with a lovely baritone crow. And neither of them kept to any discernible schedule, so we were serenaded with cock-a-doodling on a regular basis, too regular for the neighbors.
Yesterday, Alonso and Attila went to meet their maker, in Yonkers.
Silence and feminine clucking prevailed in the coop. Until this morning when Tuxedo crowed. And crowed and crowed. And crowed some more. He is indeed now the rooster in the henhouse and wants us all to know it. Poor Tuxedo will be heading soon to Yonkers.

And yes, I know it is considered terrible poultry faux pas to name one's chickens, especially ones that will soon be known as Guisado de pollo.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I need a solid eight hours of sleep, and if it is not universally acknowledged, it should be. Were it not for that universally acknowledged fact, nothing would please me more than to be awoken at 1 AM, as we were 2 nights ago, by flashing lights and voices in the driveway and the dogs barking at the excitement. You may well ask, What crisis prompted this intrusion upon our slumber? What imminent tornado, or census emergency, or political scandal, or fallen tree, or terrorist threat?
It seems someone across the street called the police to complain of the noise of barking dogs and alleged our dogs were the guilty ones.
But no, our dogs were fast asleep under our bed, inside our house. It was only when the police arrived, all a-clamor, that Daisy and Bruno set about barking. The local constabulary apologized but declined to tell us who it was that so glibly and wrongly accused our dogs of disturbance, and succeeded in disturbing us.
Then I couldn’t go back to sleep, because I was feeling persecuted. What so-called neighbor was falsely accusing us of harboring annoying canines? Had I done something to offend whoever it was? There are several other dogs around here, any of which could have been barking – though I had heard none. What made our accusers place the blame on floppy & benign D & B? And then, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that in the middle of the night small problems can inflate like a soufflé and multiply like fruit flies, I worried whether people who cause us to be awoken by the law in the middle of the night are the sort of people who find poultry objectionable. In the middle of the night, this does not seem so much a question as an implacable fact, and sleep was further postponed as I bemoaned the fate of poor Alonso the rooster. Currently, Alonso’s crowing is a mellow alto and allows me to fantasize that we live on Old MacDonald’s Farm. But soon it will grow into its full heavy-metal baritone, and I imagine that the neighbors will call out the National Guard.
Once I had imagined all the terrible things that could happen to the chickens, I started considering the problem of poison ivy. Then I began to itch, and of course the worse thing to do when your poison ivy itches is to scratch it, so I scratched it, because it was the middle of the night and I desperately wanted to fall back asleep. The scratching did not help. I have a pharmacopeia of putative remedies for poison ivy, including, but not limited to, Calamine lotion, Caladryl lotion, tincture of jewelweed, Zanfel, Technu, oatmeal baths, fermented llama urine, and Prednisone. And I considered them all as I lay awake. But the truth is that nothing works completely except almost boiling water. In fact, it is almost worth getting poison ivy to stand under a very hot shower and arrange for the water to hit the body parts afflicted with poison ivy. I am not sure how it works, but this not only relieves the itching but the hot water sets off a feeling of total pleasure, euphoria really.
It’s the sort of thing that makes me understand what it must be like to shoot heroine. Or makes me think I understand what it’s like. Or makes me imagine I understand, though it is unlikely I do.
After euphoria in the hot shower I returned to bed and read Barbara Pym.

Stones to Chicks to Stones

It is a truism that the pain of passing a kidney stone is like the pain of childbirth. Women (And women are far less likely than men to have kidney stones.) who have experienced them tell me this is in fact true, and not just the usual male thing of trying to appropriate all the glamor and agony. From my experience watching CSB and his kidney stone, I would suggest that in certain ways passing a kidney stone is far worse than labor. In particular, at the end of the process you do not have a soft and beloved infant for whom you are the universe, but a unimpressive pebbly piece of calcium oxalate, unless you have calcium phosphate or struvite or even cystine, of a size so small that you would be embarrassed to put it on your Christmas card.

It seems a shame that CSB does not keep a diary. (To paraphrase OW: I never travel without mine; I like to have something sensational to read in the veterinarian’s waiting room.) Then he, like Samuel Pepys, could write about the pain of his kidney stone and all the attendant indignities and miseries, or like Pepys he could host a party every year to celebrate the anniversary of the removal of said kidney stone. We would serve lots of fluids.

And in news from the farm:
Yesterday morning I got a call at 7 AM from our post office, letting me know that our day-old chicks had arrived. Jan the friendly postmaster (and devotee of local honey) was worried that they would get cold in the air conditioned back room. So I rushed down there, though not in pajamas, and picked up the new chicks:
5 Araucanas to lay blue & green eggs, 5 Plymouth Rocks & 5 Speckled Wyandottes, and 1 extra thrown in for good measure. All pullets. They were all sexed upon birth, but not by me. They came in a 10x10x5” cardboard box with a few holes in it and it goes without saying that they are very cute in the way that many creatures are much cuter in their first weeks of existence then they will ever be again.

You may well ask why we need more chicks when we already have 15 chickens and the answer is that we were concerned lest too many of those chickens turn out to be roosters. (also, see above.) So far only one has identified himself incontrovertibly as a rooster (named Alonso)and I am doing my best not to get attached to his crowing and strutting.

This past week I spent a few profitable hours at BEA (Book Expo America) thanks to my dear friend, Meg. The purpose of this convention, the reason publishers from all over America and the world gather at Jacob Javits and set up booths and look weird under the fluorescent lights, is to give away books & bookmarks & ARCs (Advanced Review Copies) to people like me who think the getting free books is better than dark chocolate. This year I got especially lucky and snagged an ARC of the new Jane Gardam, God on the Rocks. (This came out in Britain in 1978 and is only now coming out here with Europa. I love their editions as they are so Euro-looking, unsurprisingly.) I started it last night and read this sentence, which pretty much made my day and evening and then some: “Some gulf obtained between Margaret and children with undecorated backs.”

The following, overheard as I emerged from the hardware store (a rare outing since I don’t like to leave the suffering CSB and his kidney stone) with a new heat lamp for the chicks, may prove to be today’s best quote:
A young couple to their two young children (ages 4? 5?),“We’re going to go in there and Mommy and Daddy are going to get adjusted & you can get adjusted too if you want.”
One small child to the other, eagerly: “Lena, do you want to get adjusted?”


I learned today that the incidence of kidney stones will only get worse with Global Warming. I read this in Wikipedia and was somewhat dubious, but then I spoke with the eminent Dr David Goldfarb, Nephrologist, Kidney Stonologist, ballroom dancer and chef, who assured me that this is true. As people sweat more they urinate less and the urine is then concentrated and this leads to kidney stones. A rise of even one degree in temperature could effectively move the current “kidney stone belt” of the south to our own backyard.

Arctic Dreams and a rooster revealed

Today I pulled Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams from the shelf, because in September I will travel to the Arctic with my sister and a brother and sister-in-law, and I was told this was a must-read. And why the Arctic when the south of France still beckons? I ask myself that question. Because we like cold, bleak places and enormous skies? Because we want to lament the melting of the arctic ice cap? Because we want to chew on walrus blubber and experience scurvy first hand? All of the above. It was my copy of Arctic Dreams from the eighties, and if the dog-ears are any indication, I never finished it. When I opened it this morning, several papers drifted out: a ski trail map from Alta; a flyer from the Alta Powder Kids ski school ($14 a day for ages 6 and up); and a daily report from Powder Kids describing the progress made by a certain Tristram H in 1987. He was six and small for his age back then. His teacher described him as: “A good enthusiastic little boy”. He was ”having difficulty turning on black.” But he had “finished with edgy-wedgy”. I can’t remember the last time I – or anyone in my hearing – referred to an edgy-wedgy, but it is something to hope for is some mythical future.
Talk about Proustian madeleines. Just handling that wrinkly ski map & peering into the shaded expanse of the Black Diamond Greeley Bowl, where I valiantly tried to keep up with my then-husband and his brothers, is enough to bring on vertigo and frostbitten toes. But to remember young Tristram as he fell in love with powder skiing, as he hurled himself fearlessly from the top of the mountain and raced down heedless of the dimly-heard maternal shouts to Be Careful and Slow Down, as he dipped behind a child-swallowing mogul and never emerged, as he imitated Eddie the Eagle, the English ski jumper who solidly came in last in every competition, as he dangled his legs off the edge of the chair lift and in the process so terrified his mother that I begged strangers to ride up with him, brings on only happiness.
I could make a case here for ‘real’ books (as opposed to Kindles, Nooks, Snooks or Swindles) because they afford this possibility for unleashing memories. But I will refrain, because it is so obvious.

In other news, the chickens are now outside in their yard, pecking the ground, dashing around, clucking, and in one significant case, crowing. This morning I heard my first real cock-a-doodle do, and I was strangely moved. My own rooster! Yes, it is he-who-shall-remain-unnamed, with the bluish black feathers and the many pointed comb and incipient wattle.
I think he is either a Black Orpington or a Black Austrolorp, but I am still not sure. I am however, very sure that he is a he.

The continuance of gender confusion

Gender confusion is still the abiding theme at Clucker Hall. I sent some pictures to our friend, Annie Farrell, the farming guru, and she wrote back cheerfully that it looks like we have lots of roosters. I’m not sure who should be cheerful about this, certainly not the roosters. (Any roosters that previously had names are now being referred to as Fricassee, Stew, and Coq au Vin). How could she tell? Apparently the comb on roosters will be prominent, as will the spurs on the back of their legs. And there are several chicks out there with combs looking very prominent. Including the He-who-was-formerly-Fez, I am sad to say. According to our handy Guide to Backyard Chickens, there are several types of combs, including: single, strawberry, walnut, cushion, buttercup, V-shaped and rose.

This morning as I sipped my tea in Clucker Hall with the chicks pecking at gravel, I thought I heard a tentative cock-a-doodle-doo. Annie told us the first tries would sound scratchy & even hoarse. In a flash, I was reminded of those halcyon days of my son’s puberty – back when the mere word puberty would make him blush and run for cover – when his voice started cracking. For months I thought he was plagued with a sore throat and incipient laryngitis; I plied him with throat lozenges. When his friends called on the phone they sounded like their fathers, i.e. men not boys. Then one morning my son opened his mouth and he was a baritone, wandering through the lower registers like a lost soul in the desert.

Here is Whiskers perched and alert. Doesn’t she look like a mother? And I still have hopes that Bump is a hen; because of her feathery hairdo I can’t see the prominence or lack of prominence of her comb. CSB, being rather conservative in the matter of hair fashion, would just as soon she was a rooster.

Travel is broadening

While CSB hived the bees and the chicks grew into polychromatic feathered chickens of still-undetermined-gender, I was flying down to South Carolina seated next to a man watching a B&W movie on his laptop. I wish I could tell you that my eyes did not stray from my sheaf of business papers, riddled as they were with mysterious acronyms. But my eyes did, again and again. There was Tallulah Bankhead, afloat in the ocean with a bunch of men, and her hair only looked better with every passing day of starvation, thirst, seasickness and death-defying waves. Trying to be subtle, I looked over again and again to see how Tallulah and the men were doing, thinking perhaps that I would learn something useful in the unlikely event of a landing over water.
Don’t let the sheaf of papers fool you, for most of the flight down I was trying to recall the exact words of the witches’ false assurance to Macbeth.
"Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him."
And why was it so important to know the exact words? Because all along the Whitestone Parkway there were forklifts moving good-sized cedars and poplars, looking like nothing so much as the Great Birnam wood on the move, and making me pity poor misguided & manipulated Macbeth.

Every day in South Carolina we drove from our hotel (think multiple prom dresses, some sketchy trips in the elevator and a whole girls’ soccer team) to the Leigh Fibers factory. (Leigh was started by my grandfather; my father, uncle, a brother and a cousin have all worked there since forever; the rest of us go down periodically in order to be less ignorant in the arcana of shoddy, combers, linters and aramids. )

On account of not opting for full coverage, I am not the person of choice to drive a rental car. But still, I experienced the gauntlet of temptation between the hotel and the ramp for I-85. Midway between the LOVE TEMPLE (U.P.H), about which certain imaginations get fervid, and the Krispy Kreme, about which my favorite daughter waxes poetic, is the world famous penis-burger of Spartanburg, SC. We don’t actually know if it is officially called the penis-burger, or if it is world famous, but we know what we thought it looked like. What else we don’t know is why.

Then came the OYSTER ROAST.

While I was eyeing the boiled peanuts and wondering how long it would take me to develop a taste for boiled peanuts, or whether I was genetically predetermined (the Walloonish strain) to never like boiled peanuts no matter how great the temptation, my father was coughing his way through yet another evening. His cough has persisted now for longer than any of us can remember; it is body-wrenching, esophagus-splitting, barrier-breaking and soul searching. It is beyond his control. Sometimes if he is very quiet it will stop for a while, but he likes to talk.

While we were shucking oysters with some of the finest oyster shuckers in South Carolina and Florida (try Googling oyster shucking mitts any time you seek some x-rated diversion), and slurping up those tasty members of the phlegm family, my father was choking on his dinner and passing out on his plate.

While we were digging into Low Country Boil, a dish hitherto unknown to me and now a favorite (among its many merits, it has neither boiled peanuts nor okra) my parents were in an ambulance on their way to the hospital, where they know the names of the children of all the ER nurses.

And I was in deep contemplation of chocolate covered strawberries when my mother finally reached the cell phone of one of her offspring.

(All of which may be one way of relating that I have been in South Carolina with all my brothers and sister and cousins, and then Massachusetts with my distressed mother and coughing father. He is out of the hospital.)

The Chicks are here

As if it were not chaotic enough around here, what with the Gypsy lute-makers camping in the attic, and our mattress in the living room (While we painted our bedroom “rouge” with “desert tan” trim) along with the pillows and blankets and CSB’s tuxedo, and stacks of honey supers everywhere you turn, and bowls full of precious gourd seeds in the kitchen, and the imported Bolivian moths laying their Andean moth eggs in my sock drawer, and the Maine junior lacrosse team practicing in the front yard, the chickens moved in today.
Fifteen of them.
Because they are so small they all fifteen are residing in a large wooden crib (See above) filled with soft pine shavings, and we are hoping very much that the dogs do not think of them as a meal.
They will move into the chicken coop soon (it’s not quite ready; CSB is installing the chandelier and I’ll be hanging the damask curtains later tonight) but we’re not exactly sure when – we will have to consult with Raising Chickens for Dummies.
If we had gone about this in a somewhat normal fashion, we would have ordered day old chicks from McMurray’s Hatchery and they would have sent us hens. But instead, the little boys who formerly lived next door and now live in the next town, wanted to hatch the chicks from eggs. So our friend Annie Farrell gave CSB 24 eggs of various colors and breeds, and the boys hatched them in an incubator behind the sofa in their octagonal TV room. Fifteen eggs hatched and so far all fifteen are still alive and chirping. But we have no idea whether we have hens or roosters. And this is a very important distinction. Hens lay eggs. Roosters crow at early hours, and annoy the neighbors and in fact roosters are aves non grata in our town.

At least once a day we have some sort of discussion about chicken sexing. Chicken sexing is quite an art. (I did a lot of research on this subject for Absent A Miracle, believe it or not. Most of it did not make it into the novel.) It involves inserting a finger into the chicken’s rectum and feeling for a tell-tale bump. If you’re unwilling to do this – and I am unwilling – then you have to wait for the appearance of their secondary sexual characteristics.

So far the only specific breed identified is the Crevecour. The boys named her/him Bump, because of her/his flashy upright hairstyle. She looks like a punk Restoration playwright to me.
CSB is not going to refer to any of the chickens by name, for the obvious reason. I think he will be outnumbered.

Overheard in the 'hood

ME IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT: So, Leda, darling. We’re getting some new animals at home. Can you guess what they will be? What animal is born out of an egg?

LEDA, REGALLY IN HER BOOSTER SEAT, DRESSED IN A PINK SATIN TINKERBELLE DRESS AND RUBBER BOOTS: A dinosaur!


ME: No. What animal – that is not extinct – is born out of an egg?

LEDA: A peacock!

ME: No.

LEDA: Nana, they are so born from eggs.

ME: You’re right Leda, but I don’t think Chucker and I are getting peacocks. What do you think we are getting? OK, I’ll tell you. Chickens.

LEDA: Hugo [at day care] was scratched by his chicken when he fell off the roof.

ME: Our chickens won’t scratch you.