Letting Feathers Fall

 It’s molting time again.  It sounds like a Buck Owens song – for those old enough to remember Buck Owens. And it isn’t pretty.  "Crying time," indeed, as Buck originally sang it.  There are feathers everywhere in the chicken yard, carpeting the coop, blanketing the nesting boxes, littering the run and beyond.  It’s a disconcerting sight under normal circumstances; doubly so given the recent memory of feathery piles left by raccoon invasions only weeks ago.  Gratefully, these feathers haven’t been ripped, but merely shed.  

 

Naturally. 

 

Annually.  

 

Productively, rather than murderously.

 

Loss of these feathers is in the chickens’ best interest.  

 

Nonetheless there is a price to be paid.  A molting chicken is a pathetic sight.  Happening gradually, over time, the feather drop leaves bare patches that resemble mange.  Once magnificently beautiful, the hens are increasingly scraggly and half naked. Given how they now separate themselves from the others in the flock, even they seem to have looked in the mirror and recoiled in embarrassment. 

 

A marred appearance, then, with bodies as touchy and sensitive as one might expect with all that exposure, but also altered priorities.  With feathers to replace before winter - and temperatures already dropping - inner resources shift from egg production to more pressing business. 

 

It doesn’t take long these days – or a very big basket – to collect the ovaline deposits. There are fewer and fewer.  The chickens are productive, in other words, but in different ways; and the benefits are personal.

 

So what’s the point?  Why is this happening?

 

The answer, in a word, is renewal.  Restoration.  This, for the girls, is a kind of sabbath time.  Thoughts of progeny are set aside for the season while self care takes priority.   Over the course of this sabbatical, a new and lush winter coat gradually replaces the dimmed and tattered and jostled one that has outlived its usefulness.  It is the biblical prophecy’s fulfillment played out before our eyes:  “Behold, I am making all things new.”

 

And it gives me pause.  My season is changing as well.  I’ve got no feathers to drop and our outer coat to replenish, but plenty else that needs refreshment.  There are more than a few faded and tattered parts, both on the surface and deeper in, that could benefit from some shedding and the reassignment of resources.  

 

It isn’t, the chickens are teaching me, less work; simply different work.  And the result is something warmer and yet more beautiful than before.  

 

“…all things new.”  

 

A metaphorical molting.  I rather like the idea.  Somebody else can lay the eggs for awhile.

 

In the meantime, let the feathers fall where they will.  We'll see what new colors, what new textures, take their place.