Wilmington Weekend Update #20

The chicken blog. Pretty much anything interesting that has happened to our family in January involved chickens, as you’ll see. We came out of Christmas too broke to spend any money so we’re cooking at home, watching a little television, not buying anything, and not going anywhere. Thank God we have our chickens.

When we last wrote, Peep, our adopted schoolroom experiment, was growing forlorn. It turns out chickens are flock animals (who knew?) and need company to be happy. Margaret swore Peep was frowning, although how something with a beak frowns is anyone’s guess. Since Abby’s other classroom chickens were long gone, we had to tap into the chicken underground to get a lead on some more chicks. Fortunately I had a hunch.

I strolled into Tidal Creek Organic Co-op right after church, looking as inorganic as humanly possible in my suit and tie. I headed straight for the dairy aisle, where I buttonholed the guy stocking eggs and asked if he could hook us up. He couldn’t, but the young lady behind the deli counter could. She slipped us the name of Wesley, an NC State Agriculture major with a small farm an hour outside Wilmington.

Soon Wesley was on the phone. Yeah, he had chicks. A hundred eighty of them, mostly females. One week old. Red Rocks (a cross between Plymouth Rocks and Rhode Island Reds, good layers, calm). He’d be there all afternoon. Three bucks a piece. We’d take two. We were on the road.

Half a DVD and two chapters into The Audacity of Hope later we bumped down a dirt road and parked in front of Wesley’s trailer. He answered the door in jeans and a white tee shirt, settled the Dachshunds, and led us around back to the coop. There we hunched for fifteen minutes, inhaling the particles of chicken stool hanging in the bands of golden light that sliced through the slats. Fluffy black and white chicks swarmed around our feet like a school of fish. We learned a lot about poultry (Wesley’s major). Margaret spied the tallest, most vigorous bird in the flock, and M’shell was ours. I noticed one chick wasn’t drifting with the rest. A closer look found her foot tangled in a fiber of twine. She was weak and dehydrated, unable to reach water or food. With a little work we untied her. And so we had Yolko Ono. We were ready to pay up when a third chick caught Abby’s eye. Oh, what the hell! Alayin’ won a spot in the minivan. Wesley and his mom walked us around to see the mule, the pigs, and the goats, then we drove home to introduce Peep to her new adoptive family. Just call us the chicken world’s Brangelina.

At first Peep didn’t take kindly to the upstarts, and she attacked them. We had to quarantine Peep in her own cage while the hatchlings sorted out their social structure. A pecking order, we learned, is established when chickens peck at each other’s beaks to establish supremacy. The drama was more riveting than American Idol, and when it was over the ranking was M’shell, Alayin’, Yolko Ono. After a few days it seemed like Peep felt left out, so Abby and I tried again to introduce her to the mix. This time things went more smoothly. M’shell got up in Peep’s face briefly, but within a few pecks she learned she was now Vice President. Peep took the chicks under her wing, like a mother hen.

Two weeks ago our coop arrived in three large boxes. They rested against the side of the house just where the UPS guy left them until last weekend, which we devoted to construction and painting. This weekend we finally got it positioned, leveled, and fully assembled in the back yard. This was just in the nick of time, as the chicks have been growing alarmingly fast. We had to move them from the formal dining room to the garage, where they managed to kick up enough litter to cover pretty much everything in a fine layer of chicken poop. This was just the nudge we needed to clean out the garage today. Good times!

What else is going on? School, work, a few birthday parties, Abby had strep, the kids had friends over on Martin Luther King Day. Sellers is showing much more enthusiasm at basketball, although his actual participation in his games remains largely, uh, supportive. We did have a sad coda to the story of Schrödinger, our missing cat. A couple of weekends ago the kids were playing outside when Abby burst into the house breathless. We dashed out thinking Julian had gotten hurt and instead saw Schrödie, dead, apparently trying to crawl out from under the shed. Where he’d been for the prior three months we have no idea. Day and night calling and looking for him and we never heard a single meow. He could have easily crawled out from the front side of the shed, so we assume he must have been sick and confused. At any rate he had a proper burial deep under the spot that will eventually be the vegetable garden. He was weird and skittish cat, but he will be missed.

The coming week brings anticipation of some excitement. Wednesday I’m to do a five- minute interview on childhood obesity for the local news (it’s a small market indeed when we can get on TV this often). Friday Margaret is hosting a couple of tables of woman docs at the Red Dress Luncheon to benefit women’s heart disease research.

As I write this Francis is en route to Staunton where his mother (Margaret’s namesake) seems to be on her deathbed. Our prayers are with her and with him and Diane and the rest of the family tonight. Please keep them in your thoughts this week.

David