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.