Practice Drill

Perhaps it was Black Friday weariness.

We have three coops for good reasons.  One - the Freshman Coop - is the "pre-school" shelter that serves as the transitional home for juvenile hens who have graduated from the brooder.  It is fenced off and over-netted.  In the main chicken yard are the Varsity and Junior Varsity Coops (the names an homage to my wife's career in public education), and they house the adults - the 30 or so hens and, at present, one rooster who make up our flock.  There are two here because neither is big enough to accommodate them all.  

Except on occasion.  Like Friday night.

Though I hadn't been aware of any unusually frenetic activity - shopping or otherwise - that Black Friday evening the entire flock bedded down in a single coop.  As I noted, it has happened before on rare occasions, coaxed by the onset of frigid temperatures with the prospect of keeping warm, or as aversion to some opossum exploring the other in search of eggs or a comfortable place of his own.  Friday the temperature was quite mild for this time of year - warmer even than the night before - so winter chill was not the incentive.  As best I could with my cell phone flashlight I explored the nooks and crannies of the empty lodging - beneath; within - but found nothing hiding or threatening.  It was simply and silently vacant.  A puzzlement.

As a child at school we routinely drilled in preparation for one calamity or another.  The bell would ring in a certain pattern for "fire" and we would line up, centipede-like, and head down the hall in one direction.  A ring in a different pattern signaled "tornado" and we would line up and head off in a different direction.  In my earliest memories, from a time clouded by the Cuban Missile Crisis, frosted by the Cold War and electrified by the "communist threat in Vietnam", we would periodically and on command retreat beneath our desks for a bomb drill.  I don't recall if the bell would ring for that, or if the teacher simply shouted, "Go!" and there we would crouch until receiving the "all clear." With countless others I have wondered in subsequent years, skeptically, exactly what protection our desks would have afforded against overflying, bomb-dropping communists, but we were prepared for them - or so we thought.  Who knows?  Maybe we should be huddling beneath our desks to protect us from COVID-19?

Regularly, then, we would practice making our way to the safety of the playground, or the cafeteria, or the shelter beneath our desks, hoping we would never need the skills we were rehearsing.

Maybe that's what was going on with the chickens.  Maybe nothing at all was amiss, and they were simply running practice drills in preparation.  Winter, after all, will surely arrive one of these days with a vengeance, and I have no reason to think we have seen the last of the opossums.  and who knows what other calamities might threaten.  A lingering communist, perchance.  

Perhaps, then, it wasn't fearfulness after all, but merely prudence.  Preparation.  Practice for what is coming.

Saturday morning at sunrise I made one final inspection of the empty coop and confirmed that I hadn't missed any intruder.  Lowering the ramp of its occupied neighbor and opening the hatches, I watched as everyone spilled outside and commenced the new day.  No one seemed worse for the night's cramped conditions.  Smiling at the resilience of the birds and what I presumed to be their prescient preparation, I walked back toward the house suddenly aware of their instructive nudge.  Advent would begin the following day - Advent, the season of watching and waiting, yes, but more importantly the season of preparing.  Getting ready.  Running "practice drills" for the greener life within as without.  And I wondered how I might prepare.  

I don't know that the rooster and hens are the religious types, but their example has been an inspiration.  I don't imagine that I'll be huddling under any desks, or bedding down in a crowded coop, but I do intend to make myself more ready...

...for renewing life. 

In whatever way it might drop down, blow through, flame up, or simply blossom
out.

Between Now and Then

 With muted gold and rose striating the indigo, the night sky moves toward dawn.  Predictions anticipate a warmer day ahead – 60’s instead of 40’s.  It is a pendulum I’ve come to expect in these swing days of nature’s indecision between autumn and winter.  Simultaneously reticent to let go and eager to move on, we hover along with the transitional ambivalence; dancing between “there” and “then”.  
 
We are no stranger to the tension.  As one, myself, who abhors goodbyes while simultaneously delighting in hellos, I am easily sympathetic.  How many treasured visits come to an end by moving out from the living room, only to stall in the driveway with one more story, and then another, and only finally one last hug?  How many warm and convivial Thanksgiving gatherings are truncated by Black Friday strategizings.  Staying or going?  Holding or reaching?  Tomorrow tints today which, of course, bears the lingering scent of yesterday.
 
High winds have been foreshadowing blusters on the way, but today the last remaining hose outside will still flow freely, and there is wrap-up work to accomplish with the hives.  We will take, perhaps, a final walk around to see about final winterizing details and then, with little choice, settle into the limbo of this betweenness; alternately freezing and thawing and pondering what other comings we need to prepare for with welcome, and what grips our fingers need to loosen around those of which we need to let go.  If that sounds ominous, it isn’t really. It is simply the nature of things.  We take up; we drop.  We receive; we release.  “When I was a child…,” the apostle Paul contrasted, “…but when I became a man…”. 
 
Yes, as the song observes, “We live our lives between then until now,” but it seems true to me that we likewise live our lives between now and then.  I know the Buddhists will counter that we only have the “now,” and while I agree that the present is the only real place to live, it exists among the broken pieces of the shell of the past from which it broke out, and for all its immanence, is always moving on without staying put. Life, then, as constant motion; undulation.  Going and coming.  Goodbye and hello.  Releasing and embracing.  Sunset, sunrise.
 There are gratitudes to speak aloud, coupled with farewells.  Greetings, as well, though we know not yet to whom to speak them.  Eventually, as is the way with things, it will become clear.
 
In the meantime, we wade into the tidal currents of this day and it’s incumbent ebbs and flows, its grippings and releases – its darkness and, just now, its dawns. There are seed potatoes to order for spring and coop bedding to refresh for winter, along with deck planters to store away.  And time to protect for each other.  Being alongside the doing.  
It will rise to 62-degrees in the hours at hand if the forecast is to be believed.  I’ll just note that the forecast for 7 days hence is for 11-degrees. Goodbye, and then of course, hello.
 
Now, with the fluttering of autumn’s few and last remaining leaves, and, inevitably, then.

 

 

The Handing Over Time

Overnight the temperature toyed with freezing, but never quite crossed the threshold.  If the forecast is to be believed, subsequent nights this week will laugh at that dividing line.  The chicken yard is carpeted with feathers from the molting as the girls prepare for winter.  And so must we.  Yesterday we stored the rain barrels and reconfigured the gutter downspouts.  We replaced the chicken waterers with their heated versions and stretched the extension cords to serve them.  Straw bales are on the way to insulate the coops, and before long I’ll twist the arms of my friends to help trade out the tractor’s mowing deck for the snowblower.  There are hoses to coil and collect.  Of course there is still work to be done in the garden, dismantling the tomato supports and extricating spent plants.  There are plenty of peppers yet to harvest along with greens and leeks and a cabbage and carrot or two.  Days grow shorter while the nights stretch deeper into morning.  It’s time to clean out, clean up and batten down.

 

Winter always catches me by surprise, though its coming can hardly be a mystery.  One minute I’m marveling at the colors and the falling of the leaves and the next I’m organizing snow shovels and ice melt in the garage and flannel shirts in the closet.  There is a wistfulness to the change – to what singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer calls “the handing over time.”  I’m among the few who love winter, snow and all; but I dearly love autumn.  Fall is the only time I make room for the color orange, but on the pumpkins and trees I note its remarkable beauty.  There is a crispness to the season; a clarifying freshness that belies the seasonal decay.  I almost don’t mind the nudging reminder of the passage of time that is, undeniably and inexorably, passing.  My wallet bulging with newly minted Medicare cards, I hardly need additional reminders.  

 

But I love these days, shorter and chillier though they may be, and drawn from a bag that is only getting lighter.  I love the interiority of the hours, the glow of the hearth, the lethargy of the dogs and the softnness of the sweaters.  I love tromping through the thinner woods and scuffing my feet through the leaves.  I love exhaling and seeing my breath, picking up a pinecone, and admiring the blue/gray berries on the cedar; the anticipation of snuggling in while, outside, the elements flex their muscles.  I love the game of gathering an egg before it freezes, and finding tracks in new-fallen snow while doing my aesthetic best not to sully the scene with any of my own.  I love listening deeply into the silence – the hush that increasingly settles on the land.  I love these yet-colorful days with their morning bite and their evening silhouette and their daylight invitation to hurriedly get the last remaining chores completed.

 

And in the briskness, shivering with the joy of being alive.