Cashmere Petals of Chill

Snow was falling as I trudged out to the chicken yard.  It had begun in the darkness, already carpeting the front porch by the time first light sparkled the fresh descent.  My booted footfalls crunched across the lawn’s accumulation, while the flakes fluttered and played and found their rest on bristled evergreens and hydrangea remnants, an uninhibited bird nest, and finally my eyelashes and nose.  Celestial cashmere petals of chill.

It was cold, but the temperature was hard to notice amidst the atmospheric magic.  In these moments the eyes were in charge moreso than the skin - apart, that is, from the shivers of delight.  

With my opening of the hatches and lowering of the ramps, the chickens were free to descend and range the yard, but none seized the opportunity.  Dwayne the rooster was crowing the sun up, but preferred to welcome the morning from the comfort of the wood shavings bedding the coop and the surrounding nestled warmth of the communal quarters.  They will come down eventually - they get hungry, after all, and curious - but this morning they are happy to take it slowly.  I can almost picture them inside lazying together with the poultry equivalent of a cup of coffee and the Saturday edition of The New York Times, in no rush to trouble the new day.

Returning indoors and stripping my coat, I found my place fireside with my own cup of coffee and copy of The Times, in no hurry of my own... 

...Happily content to sit, to be, to count flakes through the frosted window, and smile at the memory of more than a few of them dancing on my nose, and settling in my lashes like pines.

The Conviction of Things Unseen

 

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for..."

(Hebrews 11:1)

We haven’t seen an egg since before Thanksgiving.  There are multiple reasons.  Trauma was a factor.  Throughout the weeks of August and September and into October, our happy little flock of 35 was steadily whittled down to 15 by the persistence of predators I proved helpless to forestall.  However devastating to me was the demise, to the sisters who watched the carnage and had every reason to expect it to include them, it was paralyzing.  They hadn’t recovered by the time molting season commenced - that annual period of feather shed prior to winter’s repluming.  Throughout the molt, inner resources are shifted from egg creation to feather fabrication.

And then winter, itself, descended.  It’s understandable to assume that hens simply find it too cold to lay eggs in winter, but in reality the constraint is light, not temperature.  Chickens require 12-15 hours of light per day to generate eggs, and in winter the sun is simply not that generous.  Through the solstice, darkness veils 16 of the available 24, incrementally yielding minutes thereafter.  It takes awhile.

The hens contend with all these biological and celestial constraints, while Dwayne the Barred Rock Johnson, our foster rooster has...let’s just say “other impediments”.  He'll not be laying any eggs.

As the new year has ventured deeper into January, however, I’ve been watching.  Searching.  Hoping.  But not finding.  They eat, they drink, they alternately scratch in the yard and huddle for warmth.  But they do not lay.

And then this morning, releasing the flock for another winter day, I glanced inside the nesting boxes where one hen lingered.  Slowly she rose and descended the ramp to join the others for a sip of water and a bite of food, leaving behind...

...the first green glimpse of spring.  An egg, still warm and as fresh and promising as the morning sun rising in the eastern sky.  The “assurance of things hoped for,” the foretaste of the feast to come.

Deep down, I suppose I knew that the nights of winter did not hold the final word - that spring would find us as surely as the dawn.  But like Noah’s dove returning with an olive branch testifying to the reemergence of dry land, the fresh egg is a joyful confirmation that hope is not in vain.  Spring is coming.  And who knows what other gifts of new life?  Perhaps it is too much to hope for that the winter of our political discourse will yield and warm to a more gestational climate; perhaps it is too much to suppose that we might awaken to the truth that our surroundings are our siblings rather than our plunder, or that our own flourishing is linked to our cooperation rather than our domination; that fertility, as nature teaches, depends on diversity rather than sameness.  

Perhaps.

But this morning, in the midst of January - against all odds - I found an egg.  

A blessed and delicious - and promising - foretaste, indeed.

Mary, Once More Beckoning

The day started cold, as winter mornings in Iowa are prone to do.  Even the chickens were reluctant to emerge from the hatch I dutifully opened, or descend the lowered ramp.  Indeed, the only incremental movement anywhere apparent was the fog, thickening the air into opaqueness, whiskering the bare limbs with hoarfrost.  The hive boxes show no signs of bees.  The remaining patches of snow, caught between melting or glistening, simply harden into crusts.

 

This is the season when, by all appearances, nothing at all is happening, or thriving, or moving.  But yet again appearances are deceiving.  Mary has moved.  Indeed, she has fallen.

 

Friends, in recent years, gifted us with a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  Standing perhaps two feet tall, she has thereafter graced the gateway to the garden – a maternal, gestational welcome to any who would pass inside; implicitly blessing hoes and hods and harvest crates passing by, or simply those with an appreciative appetite.  She is facing down, eyes firmly on the soil; perhaps in prayer, or simply and knowingly of the mind that good things come from that direction.  There she has stood throughout the seasons – remembering, blessing, anticipating; silently lending her prayer to the garden soil and the furrows inside for a fecund submission of their own:  “Let it be to me according to your will.”

 

But this morning we found Mary toppled.  It’s not that she was anchored in any reinforcing way – no cement or bolts or braces – but she is cement heavy and settled in a recess, frozen into place.  Nothing has moved her before, neither wind nor bump nor time.  Something, however, had dislodged her.  

Perhaps it was a vigorous curiosity of the groundhog who has taken up residence underneath the garden shed nearby, or nudging inspections by the deer nuzzling for food.  Perhaps it was simply the heaving of the earth below, variously freezing and thawing, swelling and contorting and tilting.  

 

All that’s clear is that the illusion of stillness is simply that:  illusion.  Mary will testify that something is happening; something is moving – motion that provoked her own…

 

…which provokes me to wonder what else is pulsing, pushing, heaving and nudging in the night, or nuzzling just beyond my sight?

 

Mary, for the record, is once again righted – once more standing hospitably by, prayerfully beckoning whatever may…

 

…to grow.

"Let it be to me..."