Wandering chick

Good evening y’all. I hope this letter finds you happy and healthy as we are all here. Hearing about snow days make me miss home even more, snow days are the best kind of unplanned fun and relaxation. We’ve had a moderately hot, but slightly cloudy week with no rain. It has been breezy on some days and for these days we give thanks, especially when we’re in the new part of the house which actually benefits from wind. The rest of the house is poorly insulated from heat and well hidden from most potential air flow. I suppose if we hadn’t suffered through one summer in this heat box, Matt mightn’t have had the foresight to build as well as he is now.

Starting out on house progress, much was accomplished this week. Matt had a few days of work at Macnuts, and no bank work so he had more time to dig into the drywalling task. We halted floor putty, the interior walls were more important to complete. With help from Keith, the ceilings have all been finished. Then single-handedly, Matt has just finished dry walling the whole house. He is out there right now (8:30pm), he has been staying up quite late working each night. The silent nature of the task gives him the freedom to take sanity breaks throughout the day for food, cricket, painting with Jacinta, naps, newspaper perusing and the like. This explains the late night dry walling. The tasks all seem to become mundane after a while and take a lot of time, but it sure feels good when each one is finished. The tiny little details are the most time consuming though, and aren’t as gratifying for they don’t cover much space.

I, for once, can say I actually worked quite a lot on the house this week. I am not underestimating the value of the other things I do like cooking, gardening, cleaning and Jacinta-caring, but it does feel good to actually be vital to this part of the building process. My all important task is puttying dry wall, covering up the seams and cracks. It is the type of job that would drive Matt to complete insanity to do it alone, but one that I can do quite well and without much pain to my pregnant body. I will soon go back out to putty this evening. I love spending the evenings out in our own little space listening to music with Matt. Next year though, we’ll be able to relax and play guitar out there with our little girl and our new little baby, rather than working all of the time. It’s surely worth all of the work, I just wish I had more energy to contribute.

Thursday evening we decided to go out for pizza in order to free up more putty time for me, and just to get out of the house. In the past few years I haven’t really appreciated the “all you can eat” style of dining, but right now I can say that showing up at a restaurant with your hungry two year old is really exciting when you don’t have to wait to eat. The owner was also very kind responding to the fact that I was a vegetarian, I think it was because I am so obviously pregnant. He cooked me a special pizza and put the whole thing on our table, rather than placing it in the warmer with the other buffet items. Following our nice quick meal we stopped at the beach and ran along with Jacinta jumping from puddle to puddle. The tide was out, leaving in its wake hundreds of puddles filled with hermit crabs crawling along in their shells in the sand. Jacinta, of course, fell into the water face first and soaked her clothes, but didn’t mind. The sun was going down and left us feeling even more peaceful than the pizza did, and re-energized to go home and work on the dry wall again.

The garden has been bountiful this week providing us with salads, beans, potatoes, our first green peppers and tomatoes, squash, carrots, beets, and loads of spinach and cucumbers. No one vegetable has yet become overwhelming but perhaps the cucumbers will be the first to do so. I feel obligated and lucky to serve cucumbers at every meal. Hopefully we’ll soon be overwhelmed with tomatoes. One night I made a potato salad all from the garden with garlic, green onions, celery, dill, homemade mayonnaise, and potatoes. Lettuce is hard to grow here in the summer because it gets too hot, so we only have lettuce in salads once in a while. I’m almost over my silly notion of scarcity in the garden and just pick things as I want them, rather than saving them just in case they may grow bigger or just in case I might really want them on a later day. One thing that helps me is predators. If I wait another the day, the slugs or caterpillars may indulge, or perhaps the cows will break through the fence and demolish a patch of corn. In fact, the sweet little calves did this on Tuesday. For a day or two, I couldn’t bear to go and witness the damage, but eventually I had to because there were more calves in there trying to finish the last few stalks of corn off. I take silent pleasure knowing that after ripping open a few corn cobs that were not yet ripe, the cows didn’t get lovely ripe sweet corn, it was white and not sweet.

All week I have been dreading fence reparation and could not summon the energy to do it. I prefer to watch from above and chase the cows away when they come. Today Keith dove into the task and Jess and I, out of guilt, joined in. We finished half of it and in the end, it wasn’t so bad. I think perhaps that I’m just bitter that most of the damage is from the stupid goat rubbing her horns and scratching her back on the chicken wire. The cows rub up against it also, chicken wire is called chicken wire for a reason, not cow or goat wire. It is all a learning process. How strong does your fence need to be to keep cows and goats out? Farmers know this, it has to be electric or take long hours of labor in upkeep for any other type of fence. But, alas, I am not a farmer. I am a simple gardener that needs to learn how to deal with other people’s livestock.

Real farmers would not keep old chickens that did nothing but poop and eat seed, nor allow them to free range if they continued to disappear. Real farmers may question the logic of paying for large quantities of seed in return for one to three eggs a day. We now have 13 chickens in the pen, down from 21 a few months ago. Three chooks are now clucky, which means that their instincts demand that they sit on a nest of eggs and keep them warm. Problem: these are unfertilized eggs, and none of the clucky hens can even lay eggs! One is the grandma chook, Old Mother. She sits on top of other chickens while they lay, and sometimes eats their eggs once they vacate the nest! Last night before bed Jacinta dismounted her rocking horse and said, “Mommy, look at that!” A tiny black chick was beneath the veranda, chirping and blindly trying to make its way to a mom of some sort. We all figured out that it had probably hatched from the gray hen who had disappeared about a month ago. We thought she had either gone crazy or was sitting on eggs, but we could not locate her nest. She runs out of her hiding spot like a mad chicken for about thirty minutes each day to scarf down seed, chug water and take a quick dust bath.

So with a cold, lonely chick as an impetus, we earnestly looked for Mrs. Gray’s nest last night and found her under a pile of lumber and tin. Keith had a good idea of where to look, Jess held the torch, and I had the honor of sliding the sweet chick under her mum’s bum. It was all very exciting, especially for Jess who saved its life on her way to bed. She was able to hold the chick close and feel its softness. She is learning to handle animals very well, from holding a big stick to ward off the goat to picking up and carrying clucky little hens away from the nest. She has seen death in the animals here and so far, is quite comfortable with the circle of life. Not having grown up with this experience myself, I find it strange when Jacinta wakes up happily and the first question she has is, “Is the birdie dead?” To my surprise I soon found out, she was talking about Grandma Mary’s new parakeet who lives in a cage. It was still alive, unlike some of the injured birds that Keith tries to save. We also checked on the little chick and yes, it was still alive!

New life is actually a common theme this week. Our friends Carrie and Chay had their second baby, a little brother for Otto, one of Jacinta’s best buddies in Michigan.

I feel a little life within me and can’t wait for the day he or she will come to join us outside of my womb. I think about how much relaxing is involved with caring for a newborn and think, “ahhh…that will be nice.” We shall see. I also heard from a friend who made some major life changes and as a reward, found renewed joy and calm in everyday life.

I hope you all find new life somewhere in your daily routine for it doesn’t just come out of big pregnant women and broody hens. It’s everywhere!

Love and Peace,

Shana