Requiem For Three Hens

Last Monday I did my least favorite farm chore, one that I dislike even more than cleaning the chicken house:  I took my three oldest layers to be slaughtered.

They hadn't done anything wrong.  They'd just grown old--perimenopausal, to be exact.  They still laid an egg every once in a while, but not often enough to warrant feeding them through the cold months, at which time their laying would decrease even more.  I had anticipated this back in the spring, when I bought eight day-old pullets whom I expected to begin laying in the fall.  This has now happened, and these teenage hens are laying like a house on fire.

The perimenopausal hens were only three years old--time passes quickly if you're a chicken.  They were Buff Orpingtons, big-boned, blond and plump like Walkyries, with calm dispositions seldom found in the operatic world.  Orpingtons are a "heritage" breed.  This means that they don't lay as early or as long or as consistently as modern hybrid hens.  They also exhibit a strong tendency to become broody, to sit on eggs for weeks at a time in the hopes that something will hatch.  They don't care that there's no rooster in sight, and the eggs are therefore infertile.  All they care about is sitting with Buddha-like concentration on the nest, keeping all the other hens at bay.  This results in broken eggs and in eggs laid in odd corners of the coop by desperate hens.  And while a hen is broody, she doesn't lay eggs.

I hope I have convinced you by now that slaughtering the three Buff Orpingtons was the rational and sensible thing to do.

In our many years together, my husband and I have occasionally slaughtered a chicken or two.  The slaughtering part we do beautifully, choreographing each step so the chicken is hardly aware of anything (I keep my hand over her eyes the whole time).  The plucking and gutting and cleaning, however, are a mess.  I know that this is something that our grandmothers did routinely every Sunday, in the interval between church and dinner, but the reason they did it so efficiently is that for them, unlike for us, it was routine.  When we did it, it was hard, sweaty, smelly, uncertain work ("What is this thing on the liver?  Don't nick it, it might be the gall bladder!").

Slaughtering our chickens at home, I believe, is the humane thing to do.  The chicken dies in familiar surroundings, by familiar hands--as happy a death as a chicken can hope for.  So in opting to take my hens to be slaughtered elsewhere, I was thinking not of them, but of myself.  My comfort and convenience, because I am human, overrode the chicken's quality of death, because she was a bird. This was not a decision I felt good about, though I made it anyway.

The night before the slaughtering, in the dark, I went into the chicken house and plucked the three hens, one by one, from the roost and put them in a roomy, ventilated box without waking them.  First thing the next day my husband put the box in the car and we drove a few miles to the farm where they were to be killed.

The friendly chicken-slaughterer offered to do them right away, while we waited, so we handed him the box and went to sit in the car.  We listened on Morning Edition to news of other slaughters all over the globe, and eventually the man emerged with our hens in plastic bags, pre-cooled and looking just like supermarket chickens.  We handed him $9 and took the hens home and put them in the freezer.

It will be a while before I can look at them again.  But one day I will put them in a pot with onions, celery and carrots and simmer them for twenty-four hours.  Then I will strain the broth and freeze it, and bone the carcases and save the meat for the dogs.  And our three friendly hens will become part of our bodies.

But I'm not there yet.  Right now, left to my own devices I would become not just a vegetarian (because milk and eggs imply the slaughter of bull calves and rooster chicks), but a vegan.  And I would steer clear of all the writings that prove that plants too are sentient, want to avoid pain, and want to live and prosper.

S Is For Sensual, And Snake

The letter S is the most sensual of the alphabet.  First, there is that small descending curve:  sen-, then the big downward swoop and that little flick at the end:  -sual.

In my mind's eye, S is always a rich golden yellow.

The plant world abounds in S's--ferns unfurling, leaves curling, tendrils twining.  Our most basic ideas of beauty are entangled with the S shape, from the capitols of ionic columns, to cabriole legs, to the whiplash curves of Art Nouveau.

What makes a swan more beautiful than a duck?  That S-shaped neck. Horses are full of S's:  the line that begins at the top of the arched neck, goes through the shoulders and ends at the bottom of the rib cage;  the line that starts at the belly, goes through the loins and over the croup;  the tail.  The ideal female body is also a collection of S curves, even if in contemporary Western culture those curves more and more approximate a straight line.

Snakes, which mimic the letter S with their bodies, possess a number of other S qualities:  they are sinuous, sibilant, secretive.  They are also serene, having 100%  sang froid.  Except for vipers, they are solitary, and the ones that haunt our gardens are salutary, preying on pests from slugs to (small) moles.

Looked at objectively, snakes are beautiful, so it's unfortunate that they get such bad press.  Sure, some snakes can kill you, but most neither can nor want to.  I believe that because snakes look so sensual our culture has cast these graceful creatures as evil (see the book of Genesis).  But not all peoples have reviled the snake.  From the charming little statues that have come down to us, it looks like the snake priestesses of ancient Crete regarded live snakes both as semi-divine pets and as wardrobe accessories. 

R Is For Rustic

I remember exactly when I fell in love with the rustic life.  I was eight years old.  It was summer and I was reading under the pear tree next to my grandparents' well, into which two bottles of wine had been lowered in a bucket, to cool before lunch.  The book was Heidi, by Johanna Spyri.

I was at the point where Heidi, after a long, hot climb up the mountain, arrives at her grandfather's hut and scopes out the place:  the wooden bench by the front door for gazing down into the valley;  the tall, dark, whispering firs behind the hut;  the shed for the white goat and the brown goat.

 Indoors there is the spacious, almost bare room with the big fireplace and the iron kettle hanging over the logs;  the cupboard in which Grandfather keeps his folded clothes, his bedding, and, on a separate shelf, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and Heidi's wooden bowl.  How neat and convenient, I thought, to have everything you need--clothes and food--in a single cupboard.  Almost everything in the hut is made of wood--the table, Grandfather's chair and stool, as well as the new stool, just Heidi's size, that he makes for her. 

There is a loft in the cabin filled with sweet-smelling hay for the goats, and that is the spot that Heidi picks for her bed.  She piles up hay for a mattress and Grandfather spreads a heavy sheet of homespun over it.  There was a hayloft, too, just behind my grandparents' house, above the stables.  My grandmother would take me there sometimes to show me a litter of newborn kittens (before she drowned them, something that was kept from me at the time).  I would have liked to make my bed up there, like Heidi, but knew better than to even ask.

For dinner Grandfather toasts some cheese (it must have been Raclette) over the fire and spreads it on bread.  He milks one of the goats right into the wooden bowl and hands it to Heidi to drink.  Heidi thinks it's the best meal she's ever had.

Before the chapter was over I had fallen in love with the cheese, the wooden bowl, the homespun sheet, and the little stool, not to mention the goats.  I envied Heidi for being allowed to go barefoot, to follow the goats up into the Alpine meadows, to sleep on top of real hay.  But I also had what I now recognize as a strong aesthetic response to the grandfather's domestic interior:  simple, uncluttered, with a single object for every need and a place for every object.  And I loved the wooden furniture and the wooden bowl, and the heavy sheet of homespun.

Many years later, I read in The Mother Earth News an article on how to make a wooden spoon.  Although no wooden spoon is mentioned in Heidi, I recognized it right away as a Heidi-type object:  simple, functional, made of wood.  I borrowed a whittling knife from my husband, got myself some wood, and for several nights sat at the kitchen table, making spoons.

As it turned out, a spoon's simple aspect is deceptive.  There is nothing straightforward about its design.  The three spoons I produced before my wrists gave out had handles that were too short and bowls too deep and narrow to be of any use.  Nevertheless, I sanded them carefully, oiled them until they shone,  gave one to each of my daughters, and kept one for myself.  Today, my spoon sits in a place of honor on the sideboard, useless but revered, and occasionally re-oiled, by me.  And every time I pick it up, I think of Heidi, and her wooden bowl, and those goats.

Q Is For Quandary

Step into my clogs for a moment, and consider the situation.

You live in a place where the winters are long, and to mitigate cabin fever for yourself and your friends, you have organized a salon that meets during the non-gardening season.

 One Sunday a month people come to your house, shake the snow off their boots, and settle in for an afternoon of wine and talk.  Each time one of you speaks informally about work that you feel passionately about--sheep herding, art, writing, politics, early music, bee-keeping.  And for a while, as you sit together, the weather seems more clement, the season less dark. 

The salon, about to start its fourth season, has not bombed:  by now, the mailing list has grown to twenty.  Not all twenty, of course, come to any given salon.  But they could.  And because your living room can reasonably seat only a dozen at most, and people listen best when they're sitting down, you worry every month that there won't be enough room.

Clearly, you have to find a way to limit attendance.  But it has to be a kind and gentle way:  these are your friends and neighbors, whom you wouldn't for the world offend or depress, especially in this tiny community, especially in winter.  Various ways of doing this have been suggested to you.  The most promising is to close "admission" after twelve people have said they're coming.  If one of these must later cancel, his seat can be announced to the group that didn't make it, again on a first-come, first-served basis.  This seems fair enough, but you worry about how the ones who don't get in may feel. 

The first salon is scheduled for October 30.  What do you do?

P Is For Pesto

P is for Pesto, which makes all things palatable--even kale.

I have gone on at length before about the industrial quantities of kale that each year burst forth from a single 4'x4' bed.  I should count myself lucky.  Nutritionists adore kale, richest of all foods in vitamins, minerals, and the moral satisfaction that comes from eating what is good for you.

But, nutritionists aside, I haven't met many people--and nobody under age 35--who like kale.  I haven't even succeeded in talking myself into liking it, not even enhanced with that all-purpose enhancer, bacon.  Not even made into cream soup.  Nothing, not a long boil, or my blender, or my teeth, is able to break down the mighty cellulose in those cell walls.  At best, kale's flavor reminds me of inferior broccoli.  And yet kale keeps on growing, spring through fall, undeterred by frost or wind.

Undeterred by bugs, too.  Squash bugs destroy the squash;  the caterpillars of the white cabbage butterfly devastate the broccoli.  But nothing, not even Japanese beetles, goes near the kale.  What does that tell you?  But I should amend that:  Wolfie and Bisou love kale.  Every afternoon Wolfie breaks off a couple of leaves, gives one to Bisou, and I can hear them out there crunching on the stuff.  I think they think the leaves are a kind of bone.

But my relationship with kale changed the happy day when I heard about kale pesto.  With the help of massive amounts of garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and Parmesan, kale becomes a barely-there vehicle for those infinitely superior flavors.  A vehicle full of vitamins and yes, moral satisfaction too.  Who says that virtue has to taste bad?

O Is For Order

I like and need order.  I have to have clear surfaces on which to rest my eyes.  Pictures must be hung straight, rugs aligned, or I cannot think well.

My ears need order, too:  no background music, no background radio chatter.  Above all, no television noise--unless, that is, I'm watching television

The beings I love all bring clutter into my life.  For decades, spouse, descendants, dogs--not to mention chickens--have been scattering paper and machine parts, shoes, toys, hair, and feathers all over the house.  My days are a perennial muted struggle to maintain some minimum level of order.  The fact that I have added these beings one after another to my life and that they are indispensable to my happiness shows that I'm not completely insane about order.  But I am getting to like it more all the time. 

I did not inherit this compulsion from my mother, who, despite the minimal disruption caused by a neat husband and a single child, was not disturbed by a bit of chaos in the house.  I got it straight from my paternal grandfather, a quiet and reserved man who worked in a bank.  Before he came home in the afternoon, my grandmother would adjust the living room shutters to a precise angle so the light would shine on his newspaper.  Only she knew how to slant the pocket-watch stand on his bedside table so he could see its hands from the pillow without turning his head.  When he came to visit, he would walk straight past us at the door to fix a crooked picture.  That done, he would turn back to us and give us a papery kiss.  One of the few things I remember him saying to me was to please fix the corner of the rug that was caught under my chair.

Most people need order more as they age.  I don't remember knowing any spontaneously orderly children or teenagers, do you?  I myself used to do my high school homework with the radio playing.  But with time the brain loses its ability to screen out distractions, and we shout at our kids to turn down that music and clean up their room, for crying out loud, how can anybody think, much less learn anything, in such chaos!

I believe, though, that there is more to the desire for order than deteriorating neurons.  One could argue that there is a moral element in the wish to attend to each thing fully, whether it be a piece of music,  a book, or a person.  The desire for order also has a strong aesthetic component.  After all, Baudelaire ranked order first among the qualities of his ideal environment: " ...ordre et beaute / luxe, calme et volupte."  Lose order, and there go beauty, luxury, calm, and pleasure.  The French are an orderly breed.

But then, on the other hand, there is Robert Herrick's Delight in Disorder:

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:—
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distractión,—
An erring lace, which here and there	5
Enthrals the crimson stomacher,—
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly,—
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat,—	10
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,—
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

Must not forget that erring lace, that winning wave.

N Is For Nevermore

Nevermore will I sleep with my hair in rollers.
Nevermore will I wear a garter belt.
Nevermore will I walk long distances in spike heels.
Nevermore will I keep goats (alas).
Nevermore will I invite 100 people and cook all the food myself.
Nevermore will I try to learn to knit (I'll crochet instead).
Nevermore will I listen patiently while narcissists yammer on.

Nevermore will I eat sauerkraut.
Nevermore will I plant peas.

Do you have some nevermores of your own you'd like to add?