Fowl Play

It is a fresh and beautiful morning; the sun is just about ready to peek over the mountain and warm us up here in the valley. I am standing at the kitchen sink blanching green beans- the current garden bounty- prepatory to freezing them, baking Ranger cookies. I gaze out the window as I work. The chill morning air wafts in, sweet and pine scented. I like to do these kinds of kitchen things before the day gets too hot.

Across the yard window I can watch 'the Daves' climb around on the shed roof as they fasten down new corrugated steel roofing. This is an attempt to prolong the life of this wonderfully charming but slowly disintegrating old building.

The chickens are frolicking around the yard. We let them run loose now and they have discovered that running is a much better way to get places than walking. One will get the idea to leap and fly across the yard, and soon the whole flock of them are in hot pursuit. They look like children just let out for recess, flapping their wings and zooming around. I am sure they are playing. I have quite fallen in love with those two pure white little roosters, they of the brilliant red combs and floppy wattles and perky tail feathers.

Every evening around 8:30 this troop of silly, playful creatures finds their way back into the fenced in strawberry patch and, with much squawking and flapping, they each find a comfortable perch way up in a branch in the cherry tree! I kid you not - they like to sleep in trees; and the higher the better. By 8:45 they have closed their beady little eyes and are so quiet a passerby would never know they are there.

In the beginning of our Gibbonsville sojourn I had a pair of shoes I had dubbed my 'chicken poop shoes' and would change into them whenever I did chicken related chores. Now that these birds spend the whole day marauding en masse around the greater part of the yard, every pair of shoes I own are 'chicken shoes'!