Chickens On My Mind

It is the time of year when my thoughts turn to chickens.

As the days lengthen, our hens again produce eggs, the best eggs of the entire year. It's not just their long absence that has made them so desirable. During the dark days of winter, the rare eggs we get are uniformly brown, but as spring begins, the hens who lay the green, or speckled, or olive ones start to generate jewels, feasts for the eyes as well as the palate.

Days like we've had this week are also prime foraging time for the chickens--the snow is melted and the ground beginning to thaw. They are having a feast not only on the vegetable bit leftovers from last year's gardening efforts, but also on the first bugs and worms of the season. With this year's garden still only a gleam in our eye, we can let them roam at will, scratching up the soil and pecking for insects. And the best part: they leave behind them in the garden their own fertilizer.

Finally, this is the time of year when we place our order for baby chicks. We periodically rejuvenate the flock, as old hens gradually reduce their egg production (no fears and no protests please: their retirement benefits include a full natural life span). Ordering new chicks is like buying seedlings for the garden, redecorating your kitchen, getting a puppy to keep and a favorite uncle to visit, all rolled into one. Anticipation, accomplishment, unbearable cuteness, responsibility, personality, and satisfaction, it can't be beat.

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I came to chickens late, in my 30s, and I came to writing for the community even later, in my 40s. My mother, Louise Sandberg, also came to chickens and writing late in life, she now has a big flock which supplies eggs to many neighbors and town gatherings. She writes the Cookeville column for the Journal Opinion of Bradford, Vermont. Yesterday, I learned that her spring thoughts also turn to chickens.

She has graciously given The Middletown Eye permission to reproduce the following excerpt from her weekly column for the Bradford newspaper.

Once again the Sandberg chickens were asked to contribute eggs to the Town Meeting luncheon. Remarkably, some of the hens remembered previous such requests, and had grown mature and wise enough to understand the importance of Town Meeting. What I as their caretaker and egg-gatherer did not count on was the audacious request that they be allowed to attend the meeting. My resolute "No way!" was met with minutes-long indignant cackling. At last their spokeshen, a little lady dressed in exquisitely fluffy tan-and-white plumage who lays blue eggs to boot, admitted that the black hens and the brown ones weren't as fine-looking as she, but that, she asserted, should not be a reason to be excluded from the meeting. Besides, she pointed out, wouldn't the roosters accompany them as their leaders, and didn't most of them look fancy enough?

True, I said, but an important element of the meeting was casting one's vote, I added, and for that one had to be a registered voter. More prolonged cackling, amidst the noise of which I distinctly heard the word "what?" repeated over and over in a sharply indignant way. When they had finally quieted down, the spokeshen spoke again, defying me to explain why I hadn't aided them to register.

Fortunately, the big brown dog who lives in our house had discovered that the gate into the chickens' domain had somehow opened a bit, and just then he appeared in the henhouse door opening. It so freaked the flock out that they fled into a far corner and cackled their little heads off all over again, and the dog and I snuck out. Thus, dear readers, no chickens attended Town Meeting, but their eggs were good, and I don't expect the hens to bring the matter up again for another year.