Because All Of Us Need A Rest

Yesterday there were two; the day before only one.  It’s going that way.  It doesn’t take long or a very deep basket these days to gather eggs.  Intellectually — and historically — I know that chickens require ample hours of light to produce eggs, and light is increasingly offered in diminishing doses as autumn leans toward winter.  Nonetheless, the annual scarcity of these egg runs always leaves me feeling deprived; impoverished, even though I know that the myth of perpetual fecundity is a lie.  Resourcefulness has its seasons.

It’s not only the stingier light.  The molt has set in among the coops — the chickens are losing their feathers; their usual colorful comeliness scragglified by bare patches, exposed quills and a pathetically bedraggled appearance.  It’s a natural, normal process of renewal and replenishment, but not an attractive one.  And whatever energies and resources the hens might have retained for egg production is redirected to refeathering.  That’s of pressing importance as temperatures fall and frost settles.  Their semi-nakedness currently provides little insulation.  I’ll never understand why nature doesn’t cycle molt through the summer when the girls would likely delight in a little nakedness, rather than the chilling close of the season more prone to shivering than sweating.  But maybe there is a symmetry between falling leaves and losing feathers.  It’s all about renewal.

Before long they will all be fittingly replumed and ready to settle in for winter’s differently paced assignments.  Which is to say that fallow time is settling in on more than the garden and gardeners.  Just as is the case with a high tunnel in the garden, it’s possible to thwart the barrenness of the nesting boxes by adding artificial light to the coops.  That’s what the commercial houses do, and I’m content with the findings that the sustained production does the chickens no harm.  It simply uses them up faster.  Burns them out, so to speak, in a matter of seasons, and I have little interest in or incentive for that.  

After all, if the image of the Taproot is to be more than a name on our sign — if it is to inspire and signify our intentions and practices — then encouraging us all, humans and hens and humus alike, to exhale fully, reach more deeply, drink from more remote and mineralized reservoirs rather than the surface waters that run and evaporate, and gather in the subterranean nourishment only available to those who give their roots the time and space to grow longer and downward is simply the blessed course of things here.  More than a discipline we practice, it’s a natural but essential rhythm practically forgotten in our culture’s frenetic addiction to productivity that we are determined to counter-culturally model.

And so we will not be selling eggs for the next few months.  The hens — along with the rest of us — have deeper, more important work to tend to.  We’ll all be better for for it.