From Creek to River

Since I got my first chickens a few years ago, it’s been a running joke as to how I now have “poultry therapy.”  As you do when you form an interest in something, people buy you things related to that interest. I now have shoes with chickens on them, a few “love my flock” chicken t-shirts.  Pictures and signs that declare that I am from here forward a “chicken lady.”

American Red Sexlink hens

But really, I am. I am a chicken lady. I never resent the time spent carrying out feed, water, shoveling out old poop and straw, and collecting the eggs. The hens are always delighted to see me, and their needs are fairly simple. The few minutes a day give me a chance to step away from my desk and enjoy a moment outdoors.

This morning, the hens clucked at me and hung out at my feet, straining to see what I had in the bucket. They don’t mind sitting on my feet and will sometimes squat and stretch out their wings to allow me to pet down their backs and scratch into their feathers. It’s probably some kind of defense mechanism, but I’ll take it as some kind of weird affection. I studied the eggs as I walked back to the house.  They are not like the pristine white eggs that you will find in the carton at your favorite grocery store.  These eggs vary in shades of brown, one being much lighter than the other, although I can tell you from experience that once I fry it up, I can’t tell the difference.

Another one has what I call a wart at the end of it. It’s just a glob of extra eggshell that perhaps didn’t get smoothed over while still inside the chicken when it was forming. To be honest, I’m guessing as to what causes it.  But again, it causes no change to the flavor or quality of the egg inside it.

Which makes me wonder about the process of selecting those pristine eggs for the grocery store. I’m sure the quality control standards are in place to ensure we don’t get any rotten, cracked, or deformed eggs that might make us sick. Especially, since they are not going from chicken to frying pan within a few days as they do at my house.

But I can’t help it, I like that my chickens produce these unique little eggs. The eggs are as different as my hens are from one another. They do not conform; they do not sit in the carton looking just like all the others. They are warty and come in different shades. I think everyone should have a few chickens in their backyard and spend a little more time meditating with the hens.

I get lots of compliments for being a “good mom.” And man, I’ll take them, because no one can say that I don’t put in the hours and the work. But I also don’t do it alone. For the men in my life, you’ll get your moment next month, but for today, on Mother’s Day, I want to focus on the women.

For many years, as a teenager and starting into my twenties, I foolishly thought that being a strong woman meant being forceful and sometimes even rude, and that was a little true for some of the situations that I found myself in. But gradually, I lost the need to raise my voice just to be heard. I proved myself by being good at what I do, working hard, and patience.

I was 37 before my first child was born, and the great thing about being that age is having patience. Not only with your child, but with the world around you, because everyone has a bit of advice – from the cashier at Walmart to every relative that shares a drop of blood with you. It can be hard to pick and choose the good advice from the slush pile.

My husband and I began with the end in mind – we wanted our girls to grow into strong women so they could protect themselves, but we wanted them to also be kind and empathetic to those who didn’t have all of their advantages. We wanted them to be comfortable in their own skin and ready to take on the world. If there is a job to be done, let their hands be the first ones to reach out to help. Honestly, the list of what we wanted is longer than I can probably manage in one short piece.

And if you’ll forgive a moment of boasting, I think we’re getting there. But we definitely didn’t do it alone.

The women in my girls’ lives have a wide range of interests and influences. But I can easily say that they are all strong. They have experienced loss and yet keep moving forward, even if sometimes it’s with gritted teeth. They are all beautiful and show that you don’t have to wear makeup to be naturally beautiful – and sometimes, the best look is that fresh-from-the-river look where you might be a little grubby, a little fishy-smelling, with sun-kissed cheeks and a smile on your face.

They teach that the best food comes straight from the garden, and the greatest way to say I love you is with a freshly baked cake, from scratch of course. The women in the lives of our girls demonstrate the pure joy of throwing down some newspaper on a picnic table and digging into a low country boil.

Being together does not always mean spending money, or big trips, or even being away from home. It can be an afternoon at a swimming pool, or it can be curling up on a sofa with a blanket to watch a horror movie that I, as their mother, refuse to watch because I think the world is scary enough, thank you very much. It can be playing cards or board games or chess, and oh, the girls are learning some strategies for life and didn’t even realize it!

The women believe in the necessity of art – whether it be dancing, singing, playing piano, drawing, sewing, crocheting, or embroidery. Being comfortable in your own skin may mean getting up on stage and pretending to be someone else.  Or that art doesn’t have to be traditional – it can be a thought-provoking little piece that’s half driftwood and half jewelry. Pick your art for today – the important thing is to imagine and create.

The point that I am trying to make is that the girls do not learn all of these things from me alone. I do try to demonstrate all the positive qualities as well as letting them see that it is permitted to cry and have a bad day, as long as you pick yourself up and keep going. But while the world rushes in with lots of negatives, I am so extraordinarily grateful to the women in my life who guide our girls through life, sometimes just by being themselves. Happy Mother’s Day.

And to my girls, who make every day of my life something to be remembered, thank you for making me a mom.

My main chore growing up had been the pigs. Weed the garden, scraps from the kitchen – take them to the pigs. Morning and evening, feed the pigs, carrying water buckets the length of the driveway. I had shoulders of steel. But when I moved back home after many years in Kentucky, I missed the chore, so I bought two shoats. I’m a good farmer and they quickly grew into a few hundred pounds. I arrived home from work one day, in my 3-inch heels and a dress, to an empty pen.  Standing in the driveway in the pouring rain. I yelled, “Hey pigs. Time to eat.” The two came racing down the road, grunt, grunt, grunt, with every footstep. They stopped at my feet, and I walked through the muck into the pen as they followed. My shoes ruined, but luckily, I saw the humor of it.

Seirah the Rottie watching her charges

A week later, the same event, but no pigs came running. I headed to my house to change clothes to go looking. I always left my side door open so my Rottie could come and go as she pleased. The two pigs had decided this was an open invitation and let themselves in. I had planned on replacing that carpet, but the piles of pig shit motivated me to get it done sooner. One pig lay on the dog bed by the TV and the other one lay on the cool floor of my bathroom. They had treated themselves to some of my oil paint, black and blue, then rinsed the taste from their mouths with sips from the toilet. The one in the bathroom had also rummaged through my laundry basket, leaving blue streaks on the side of the white basket that are still there to this day. With shoulders slumped and a weary head, the dog and I walked out the driveway, pigs at our heels, to let them back into their pen.

Is it weird to say that I miss having pigs?

Needless to say, that weekend, the pigs got a new wall on their pig house to cover their escape hole, and I ripped out the carpet and deep-cleaned the rest of the house.

The next year, I bought six shoats.

The Boxes

The boxes are there, in the corner, taking up space that I could use for a thousand other things, like books, or stacks of magazines that I never read but can’t help but accumulate, or clothes to go to Goodwill, or boxes of items that I could sell on ebay.  But the space is not available in this very large house, because they are there.  The boxes.

              It’s been seven months.  Seven, that’s a magical number, I tell myself. A good time to open the boxes and start sorting through a lifetime of minutia.

              There is not that many of them. The boxes.  As someone who abhors knick knacks with a passion, it was easy enough to pass those by when we were cleaning out Granny’s house.  And the years in the empty house had taken their toll on her shelves of books – like the matching spines of all of her Zane Grey westerns.  Books that she read over and over, like visiting with old friends.  She had shared them with me over the years, introducing me to wagon trains, Indian fighters like Lewis Wetzel, and the romantic west.  But the damp had crept into the old farm house in her absence, and covered the outer surfaces with a thin mold that made me want to wash my hands immediately.

              Feeling like I was invading her personal space, I shook out every box and drawer, searching for the snippets of poetry that she would write on the outside of envelopes or on the back of someone else’s stationery. At the time, I had not sorted through the slips of paper, just stacked them into the boxes to deal with later.  Now, it was later.

              I pulled out the smallest of the boxes, and found it was only half-filled. Obviously, my focus while packing had not been on full throttle. First, I sorted through a stack of empty envelopes, all addressed to her.  They had probably been Christmas cards, birthday cards, or even just cards to say hello.  Not a week went by that she didn’t receive some correspondence from a far flung family member.  She kept the envelopes in case she needed the address, placing them into stacks in the bookshelf. Finding the address then consisted of looking through all of the stacks, all of the envelopes for the one that she needed. And even then, she could never say whether the address was the latest, or from ten years ago. Gifts to her included address books and rolodexes, but they received no better treatment getting stuffed with the torn off address label, but not always stuck in the right section of the alphabet.

              I diligently checked each envelope, and found a larger envelope filled with a stack of mementos of her children.  I started to divide them into stacks to send to my aunts, my uncle, and my dad. I carefully categorized each small pile. In three yellowed envelopes, labeled with the names of her two daughters and her youngest son who is almost 70, I found tiny locks of hair.  Even as a mother myself, I marvel at the love of a mother for her children, holding onto precious keepsakes for all these years. They had not had a lot of money, so she had probably cut their hair herself.

In the pile for her oldest son who is now in his 80s, there is a grade card with one corner slightly mouse-chewed, pictures of his wedding to his second wife, and pictures of the lake at Tahoe where he now lives. The postcards of western rocks that I know he bought for her I slipped into my own pile. Her son had always hoped to delight her with the sight of the ocean when she finally went to visit him in California in her 80s.  She had smiled and dipped her fingers in the ocean water, but the tall rocks and waves of striations had left her amazed instead. When she had returned from that trip, she had knelt in the yard, butt in the air and kissed the ground.  Later, side by side, we sat together on her sofa and she had walked me through each of the pictures she had taken, including one of the black male flight attendant who had been kind to her. In my mind, I can see the veins in her hand and the knots of her fingers as she points to each picture and I can hear her voice as she creates the adventure of the trip with her words. Probably because she told it to me more than once.

The first box is empty. Pictures sorted. Small packages ready for my uncle, my aunts, and my dad. I wonder if one day I’ll have grandchildren who will be left to sort through my drawers.  Will they pull out three postcards and wonder why the image of Red Rock Canyon had been precious? Maybe not. Or maybe they’ll find a picture of an old farm house and a woman kneeling to kiss the ground and they’ll hear my voice in their head, telling the story of her adventure.

Growing up on a mountain with few neighbors and no siblings, reading became my main source of entertainment.  Especially during summers, when I would want to hide from the list of chores that my mother would devise for me to do, books let me escape.  Even if she found me, she was sometimes loath to interrupt me since she saw reading as a strong part of education.

As a mother, I follow that same mantra. It is hard for me to sit on my hands and not dictate a thousand titles that my daughters should read. Titles that swept me away at their age. They do read, probably more than the average child, but they have each other and an unlimited amount of TV shows and movies when allowed to have screen-time.  Reading to them is casual entertainment and not the longed-for companionship that I craved.

But this week, I found direct evidence of reading as a source of enrichment.  During the past school year, while we homeschooled due to Covid, I “assigned” the book, Sarah Plain and Tall, to one of my daughters to read and discuss.  Each week, we read a few more chapters and chatted about what was going on in the story. By the end of the so-called semester, my daughter had finished the book, and as a family, we watched the movie as a treat. There is a scene – in both book and movie – where Sarah trims the hair of the children. She takes the cut hair and lets it run through her fingers and out into the field, so the birds could use it for their nests. 

As the weather began to warm up, the girls brushed our dog, Necco, who has thick white fur.  They took the piles of fur, and like the character in the book, let it fly out into the field rather than just stuffing it into the trash. This week, while walking along the tree line, I came across a bird’s nest that had been blown out of a tree.

The base is thick with twigs, but lining the inside, where the eggs would lay, is the smooth white fur of Necco.  I carried the nest in to show to the girls.  With tiny fingers, they traced over the fur lining, and in delight, they said, “Just like the book.”

Yes, I thought, just like the book.

I came out of my home office and called out to my youngest daughter. “Did you get some lunch yet, or do you want me to fix something for you?”

She said, “You have to fix something for the frogs, too.”

Not paying close attention to her, I said absently as I pull some things from the pantry, “What frogs, babe?”

She held up both hands, where two frogs sat quietly.  On the one hand, I am thrilled to have daughters who don’t mind frogs, toads, worms, or even spiders, but I don’t want them bringing them into the house either.

“Sweetie,” I told her, “remember that I said that you couldn’t bring wild animals into the house?”

“They’re fine,” she insisted. “They have water and food.”

“Yeah, but maybe their family misses them. Maybe they have a brother or sister who wants someone to play with.”

“I wouldn’t miss my sister,” she told me. Her face took on the stubborn look that I knew probably mirrored my own at that age.

“Well, either way, the frogs have to go outside.  Put them back where you found them.”

“They were in the dog bowl.”

“How did they get into the dog bowl?”

“I dunno.”

While I stared at her, trying to fathom how or why frogs decided to move into a dog bowl, I noticed that one of her hands was steadily dripping.  One of the frogs had just peed on her.  My daughter’s nose wrinkled slightly, but she didn’t drop her charges.

In my best mom voice, I said, “Take. Them. Out. Side.”

“Okay, but it’s not my fault if the dogs eat them.”

“Fine,” I answered. “And where is your sister? I want to ask her if she’s had lunch.”

Her eyes scrunched up a little, and she said, “She’s in our room, but maybe you shouldn’t go in there.”  Without waiting for my response, she headed out the door.

I looked over at the closed door of their room and then turned around to go right back into my office, where the world made sense.

Claire dislikes people in general. You can see the look on her face as she tolerates them.  Too many hugs, or get too much into her personal space, and she’ll get up and leave. She could not care less if it hurts your feelings.  She’s almost the exact opposite of her brother, Nathan, who given a moment to think about it, has a great love and affection for every person he meets.  Claire is a bit unfriendly. She keeps me up at night. She rarely purrs, and when she does, it never more than a few seconds, like a smile from an old grouch that slips out. And yet, my day would be empty without her.

              Claire has long, sharp claws, and she has proven that she’s not afraid to use them against the girls. Since they like to make up little beds in little hideaways around the house for her, she will spend time with them.

If you pick her up, she tenses and jumps away as soon as possible, unless you prop your hand under her back feet and let her dig lightly into your shoulder with her front feet, giving her a sense of control. The girls carry her on her back, like a baby doll, but you can see the panic in her eyes. On the other hand, Nathan can be draped around your shoulders like a scarf as he stares back at you with sleepy eyes. He dozes on shoulders, chest, lap, or anywhere in between, as long as he gets attention. Claire reminds me of myself wanting a warm blanket and to be left alone in peace.

              In the night, a warm figure will appear against the bottom of my feet. If I get hot and push her away, she eases back into place. If I try to pull her up closer to my belly where I can pet her, she will stiffly tolerate it before retiring to the back of my knees, out of reach.  I have woken many nights on the precarious edge of the bed after slowly inching away from this ball of heat while she claims the center of my side of the bed. If my husband pulls her to him, she blinks at him as if unsure of the reason for his existence before returning to her self-proclaimed spot at my feet.

              In the morning, when I get up and pad to the bathroom, I have learned to leave the door partially open. If I don’t, Claire will meow and scratch at the door until I let her in.  Even then, she will sit on the edge of the tub and give a long list of meows, pausing to let me respond. I can only guess that she complains about my movements in the night or sharing some kitty dream. The girls shake their heads and call me weird for having these little conversations with her. 

              When we move from the bathroom to head down the hall to the living room and kitchen, Claire does not like to walk behind me or beside me.  Instead, she lets me get a little bit ahead, and then she races in a full-out horse-hoof clattering pelt to get in front of me, and then she slows down to a snobbish saunter.  My husband says he can tell when I am leaving the bathroom just by listening to the sound of Claire’s feet on the hardwood.

              Claire feeds herself from the bowl in the kitchen, visits the litter box in the laundry room, and then she sits and waits as I take care of everyone else.  She will ignore the dog, who, respectful of her claws, returns the favor.  She may hiss at Nathan or the other two half-grown tom cats if they look too long in her direction.  Then, at long last, as I head to my home office in the corner of the house, she again runs in front of me to reach the door first so she can stroll into the room as if she owns it. As I start up my computer, Claire picks out her first spot of the day, where she will hang out until lunch.  After lunch, we repeat the ritual as we move from room to room until it is finally bedtime again.

              My youngest daughter claims that Claire is her cat because she picked her out, but I teasingly like to point out that she is my cat because Claire picked me.

Today is the day of my grandmother’s funeral, and I woke up thinking about fried chicken and preachers. My grandparents raised chickens for many, many years. They had a small shed on the hillside above the house called the brooder house. During the frigid winters, they would load up the wood stove with a warm fire and Granny would tell how the chickens and young chicks would line up around the heat of the stove. She marveled at how they would stick together in neat little rows. The eggs would be gathered every day, and once a week, Grandpa would load up a huge stack of egg crates and take them to Town (always a capital T in my mind as she told her stories) to sell.

As you gathered eggs, there may be one chicken who didn’t like being ousted from her spot as you checked for hidden eggs and she’d retaliate with a little nip. That one, Granny explained, would be the preacher’s chicken. Each Sunday, the preacher would visit one of the families of the church for dinner after church service. I’m sure that the women in the community would lay out their finest during these visits. I’ve heard of revenge being a dish best served cold, but as I think about her story, I think for Granny, it must have been a dish served fried in Crisco and served to the preacher.

Because of Covid, the service today will be a gathering of cars to follow the hearse up a rocky rutted road, and a short graveside service as we all sniffle through our masks and shiver in six inches of snow as another storm comes blowing in to knock us off the mountain ridge. My cousin said Granny had often told her that she’d be sitting on her little pink cloud, laughing at all of us. I wonder if we’ll look like little chicks to her, gathered in a circle around our center of warmth? We will celebrate her life, sharing the thousands of stories of her and by her. And I, for one, plan to remember her tomorrow on Sunday, by fixing fried chicken.  

When you were born, at least a dozen of the family members gave us exquisite baby blankets.  Hand stitched, quilted or crocheted, they were soft, beautiful, and a complete pain in my behind.  For every visit, as family showed up to look at your stormy blue eyes, I had to remember who gave us which blanket to be sure to have it on hand to show that we were grateful for their thoughtfulness. I had learned this quickly after the first few questions about missing blankets, or comments on how much time so-and-so had put into their blanket, or sad observations on stains that appear as they do with every baby. Everyone wants to feel special and appreciated, so I did my best to keep it mind, despite being an exhausted new mother.

Luckily, you and I were able to spend most of our time alone.  During those precious moments, I would carefully fold all the special blankets and put them away to keep them pristine. In their stead, I bought a five dollar blanket at Walmart.  It was green, soft, and I didn’t have to care about it.  If we sat outside in the grass, I would throw out the green blanket. No worries if it got grass-stained.  If we played on the floor with the dogs or the cats, I would spread out the green blanket.  It was easy enough to throw into the washer. As the air got cooler and we traveled to and from the babysitter, I could throw the entire green blanket over your car seat as we walked through the yard, unlike all of those teeny tiny baby blankets that would cover only half of you, or slip off as we scrambled to keep them clean.

As babies do, you grew, and grew.  The special blankets stayed packed away, while you kept the green blanket tossed over your shoulder, a constant source of comfort to you as you crawled then walked.  If you watched TV, the blanket curled around you and a cat. If you played in the floor, the green blanket was your cushion. When we traveled, you would wrap it around your arms as you leaned back in your car seat. Everyone became used to seeing you with your green blanket. Everyone assumed that green was your favorite color, when in reality it was mine.

 Instead of a description, the blanket earned the name, The Green Blanket.  Going out the door meant checking that you had The Green Blanket before we left.  Bedtime meant making sure that you had The Green Blanket in bed with you.  This went on for years.

This week, I was helping you to tidy up.  Blankets are still the favorite gift of family members, so they tend to pile up.  They are big and small, soft and slick.  I see images of Elsa and Anna, of Minions, of solar systems, and rainbows.  We folded them up and packed some of them away.  It had been a while since I had seen The Green Blanket, and I had half forgotten about it.  I flipped over a pillow, and there it lay, neatly folded as a cushion in the corner of your bed.

Casually, I asked if you wanted me to pack it away, since it was worn and not as soft as some of the new blankets. No, leave it there, you said. You looked at me, gave your little knowing grin, and patted me on the arm. I laughed at you, a little girl who knew exactly how to make her mother feel unique. I smoothed out the wrinkles in the fold of The Green Blanket, then covered it up with a pillow. A little bit of ordinary, but hidden and special for just the two of us.

I had looked forward to the concept of the year 2020. I thought then it symbolized a perfect year for clear 20-20 vision. What exactly I expected to see now seems to escape me. Perhaps a chance to see new things, because we had trips planned. Perhaps a chance to focus my efforts on a variety of personal projects. Another year to watch my daughters grow and learn in their chosen activities?

And yet, the year 2020 arrived and swept all of that aside.

Instead of beginning the year with clarity, we felt confused, worried, and a sense of unreality sunk in. People were dying all over the world, and the virus seemed to creep closer and closer to us. We felt great love and concern for people and yet wanted no one to get within arm’s reach. Our leaders sniped at each other with comments we would not allow on a kindergarten playground. I actively worried about children in homes with not enough food or in homes of abuse and had dreams of how I could rescue them. No, the world was a blurry place, and I felt more and more like I was in the eye doctor’s chair taking my eye exam and knowing with gut-wrenching anxiety that it was a test I could never pass.

We began to make decisions. We delayed plans for trips. We withdrew into our homes and made alliances with those of similar mindsets. We chose to mask or not to mask. To visit a loved one, or just to call. Conferences were canceled, as were family reunions. Family members would go into hospitals for procedures and forced to wait in the parking lot, we waited for news when every fiber of our being said we should be inside at their bedside, ready to quiz the hospital staff for details.

It is the last day of 2020. In years past, I would spend this last day of the year thinking forward about New Year’s resolutions and setting challenges for myself. Yesterday, a radio DJ announced that they would play the ‘best songs from the worst year’. Instinctively, I wrinkled my nose at the word, best. What was best about anything in 2020? Grudgingly, I gave it some thought. This forced me to stop and think and apply the magnifying glass not only to the horrors of the world but also to the treasures.

Family and friends have always been important to me. But would I have talked to so many of them by phone if I hadn’t felt the need to reach out and check on them? To send notes and little treasure in the mail to those I miss? I know for certain with all of the running around to basketball and piano classes and book groups and writers groups and community events that I would not have spent as much time at board games, reading books together, and just sitting at leisure at the dinner table and talking, sharing stories, and making plans for “after” with my husband and daughters.  

I would have assumed the girls were learning everything that they were supposed to in school, rather than working with them one on one, rebuilding on areas of weakness, and being in complete awe of their abilities and creativity.

I would not have spent the time on myself. Taking the long hikes over the mountains, both for the exercise, and wiping away the cobwebs of spending day after day in the same house with the same faces and then feeling the joy of Mother Nature as a breeze picks up and spatters my face with a light rain.

I would have allowed myself more days just to pick something up to eat on the go, rather than to pick new recipes out of the book and give it a try in the kitchen, loving that my husband will eat it, whether it turned out right or not. I would not have spent so much time with the written word, instead of feeling guilty for stealing another minute from family time.

Make no mistake, I am happy to see the backside of this year, these problems, and for certain this virus. But I also cannot leave this entire year behind.  Perhaps my resolution is to take this new vision of the world, and like eye drops, apply it as needed when we get back to “normal.”