The clever soul who hatched the phrase “keeping chickens” likely
never had to care for them longer than a weekend. Marking my fifth
spring with flock, I confess I am less a woman who keeps chickens than
one who loses them. Of 19 chicks acquired over the years, just nine hunt
and peck in our coop. Not one has landed on our table; we keep birds
for eggs only. Most hens were violently carted off to the great wood by
foxes or raccoons, a few took ill; half a dozen have been laid to rest
beyond the boxwood hedges, the main reason my husband’s co-worker dubbed
our home “Pet Cemetery.”
Charmed in the beginning by pleasures of
egg and feather, I soon learned that to love and attempt to care for
chickens is a spiritual endeavor, a powerful daily devotional that has
brought me to my knees over life’s fragility and nature’s wonder, and in
the best moments, its fleeting, feathery brushes with grace. The
chickens have given me much more than eggs, they have bestowed an
awareness I might never have otherwise found.
Most religions ask
us to care for “the least of these,” and among the animal world, it is
harder to get more least than poultry. Turkeys earn pardons. Chickens
suffer the stigmata of stupidity and skittishness. Unable to soar as
other birds do, they remain the butt of jokes. This is their cross to
bear, and proverbial road to cross. A chicken’s life is arduous, usually
short. They must trust in the more powerful to meet nearly every need.
Their
vulnerability has not magnified my strengths, but revealed my own
weaknesses. Many has been the day I failed my flock, not watching
closely enough while hawks circle and snakes spy; forgetting to fill the
water can or feeder until nearly noon. Many are the days I’ve been
paused, in my selfish, silly busyness, to consider how I treat the
people I love and how rarely I extend myself to those I do not know.
The
birds bring me face to feather with death, and each loss we suffer
together. They are not household pets, exactly, but I did not reckon the
pain to be so severe. Our first hen, Bernice, died after only a year of
natural causes. A hell of a character, she once allowed me to take her
to school in a laundry hamper for Pet Day, behaving as a saint while 27
third-graders poked and prodded. If the kitchen door were left ajar,
Bernice would sashay in to roost on the counter. Whenever I weeded the
side yard, she worked alongside, clucking contentedly.
Want to
experience amazing grace? Still yourself in a garden until a chicken
settles itself on your lap, submits to your fingers traveling the length
of its silky wing.
Bernice was fine one soft summer evening,
perching atop the coop until the others went in for the night. The next
morning her beautiful inanimate body lay in a heap with no mark upon it.
How precious life can be, how quickly and mysteriously can it end.
Beulah,
Madge and Genevra were lost to intermittent raccoon attacks. Pickles,
Philomena and Faberge fell to foxes. Berthilde was simply dead in the
coop one morning, and Roberta took ill, succumbing, despite antibiotics
and vet consultations, overnight in the dog crate.
Each winter,
hens go dormant, and for that stretch of months I fret cold dark fears
of frost and fox. An unseasonably warm February day I lost not one, but
two hens, in broad daylight to a predator unseen. Turning them out into
the sunny side yard would be a treat, I thought. Until I found most of
the birds huddled silently together under a holly shrub, two paces from a
scattered pile of pale gray feathers that, an hour before, was the
gorgeous Blue Bantam Polish Lavinia. Across the yard, beneath the rose
arbor, lay the remains of Astrid, an Ameraucana, who as a chick looked
like an owlet and grew up to lay pale blue green eggs.
A terrible lesson, how my mistakes cost others, too.
Psalm
91:4 reads “He will cover you with His feathers, and under his wing you
will find refuge. His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”
Perhaps the Lord, here, is meant as another kind of bird, something more
worthy and majestic than a chicken, but I don’t think so. Emily
Dickinson, as poets do, put it more succinctly: “Hope is the thing with
feathers that perches in the soul.”
We suffer, we fall. We
endure. With each day the chickens and I begin anew. They greet me
joyfully and without rebuke. Is that not the essence of faith? For
surely comes the spring morning when I lift the door to the nesting
boxes and, in a pile of creams and browns, are new eggs, the perfect
promise of what may come.
Mary E. Miller is a freelance writer who lives in North Raleigh.
