A Coop of Inspiration

"I never took you for a chicken guy."  That's the first response I routinely get from friends and acquaintances who hear about our recent acquisitions.  If it helps, I never took me for a chicken guy, either.  And I'm pretty sure it only recently crossed Lori's mind.  That we two urban settlers would first resettle to the countryside and then start making room for laying hens strikes us as comical as it does others.  Nothing in our educational repertoire nor professional resumes foreshadows it, but here we are, digging in the dirt, planting all kinds of things, and gathering eggs.  

Brown ones and blue ones.

Which usually precipitates further questions, and amazement.  The questions -- like "Who knew there was such a thing as a blue egg?" -- don't surprise me.  Eggs, after all, in our overly industrialized food system are almost universally white.  Diversity comes in size -- small, medium, large and extra-large -- but rarely in color.  Only recently could brown eggs be routinely found in a grocery store refrigerator case, but even then relegated to the edges as something of a quaint novelty.  Blue eggs aren't likely to gain any shelf space any time soon.  Little wonder that few people know such things exist.  

The amazement, however, is more difficult to explain -- amazement that multiple breeds exist, and amazement that we would choose more than one of them.  Of the eleven birds that now call Taproot Garden home, two are Ameraucana, two are Black Australorp, two are Buff Orpington, two are Red Star, two are Barred Rock, and one is a Wyandotte.  Beautiful, I would say -- every one of them -- and beautifully diverse.   These six hardly exhaust the options.  Hatchery catalogs are as thick and colorfully evocative as seed catalogs -- glossy photographs of all manner of sizes and colors and purposes and temperaments.  Heritage breeds, hybrids and cross-breeds; Asian breeds, European breeds, African breeds, American breeds.  

Sort of like people.  And vegetables.  And, I'm guessing, everything else around us. I remember my own surprise at discovering multiple varieties of broccoli.  And tomatoes.  And lettuce.  Etc.  Creation is an orchestra, not just in its aggregate, but within each instrumental part.  There aren't just "flutes," but bass flutes and alto flutes, tenor and soprano flutes.  Neither are there simply "drums".  And we aren't just people; we are all kinds of people -- "red and yellow, black and white" as the old children's song observes, but also short and tall and quiet and loud and any number of other diversities we are still getting our minds around.

And there aren't just chickens, but a veritable symphony of them -- each breed with physical characteristics and personality traits, but also each bird with its own unique one.  I know because I've been watching them. 

And laughing.

And marveling at them all.  

Diverse individuals living as a community within the same backyard coop -- pushing and shoving and pecking each other from time to time and haggling over a remnant scrap of food, not unlike the people who tend them; but also nestling close together on the roost at night for companionship and warmth.  

A cacophony of diversity, for the most part getting along.

An inspiration, don't you think, for this larger coop that houses us all?