Growing Girls (3 page)

Later on I wrote about this in a magazine article, more as a way of fulfilling a contractual obligation with the magazine—and as a public service to anyone getting a colonoscopy, and as a way of venting my outrage at the people who never told him to stop the ibuprofen—than as a chance to make the business of my husband’s rectum public. That part was a little hard to negotiate. In the story, I said something about what it was like to live out in the middle of nowhere at 3 a.m. when you’ve just witnessed an ambulance door closing on your husband’s white feet. I wrote about how I sat there and in my shock I couldn’t think of what to do, other than clean up his blood. I wrote about how I felt it would have been
rude
to call anyone before the sun came up. I have no idea how I came to this conclusion. Who understands the workings of the brain under normal circumstances, let alone during a time when you’re terrified your husband is dead? Anyway, in the magazine article, I wrote about how I figured I had to wait until 6 a.m. before I could call anyone, and how at six I called my friends Wendy and Gretta and they both took the girls so I could join Alex in the ICU.

Our neighbor George and his wife, Pat, saw the story in the magazine, and Pat was upset. “You could have called me!” she
said. “You could have called me at 3 a.m. and I would have come right over.” She was right. I know she would have. I have no idea why I didn’t think to call her.

Then I didn’t hear from her for a while. And George didn’t put sheep on our fields like he used to. And he didn’t plant alfalfa on our one field or oats that we would split with him. And the following spring they didn’t invite us over to see the sea of baby lambs frolicking.

So then, just a few weeks ago, Gretta drove with George to a sheep disease conference. They got to talking about us. This was nearly two years after Alex nearly bled out on a hot summer night. George told Gretta that Pat had been quite upset that I said, publicly, and to a national audience, that country people were the types of people you can’t call at 3 a.m. if you need help.

But—this was a story about Alex almost
dying
, not about George and Pat.

But!

And so began the feud we’ve been having, which I didn’t actually know we were having, and I am not entirely certain we
are
having, with our neighbors for nearly two years.

So much goes on here and yet so little seems to happen.

At speech therapy this morning, Miss Sandy tried to get Sasha to say “apple.” She could say “ap” and “pull” as clear as day. Ap. Pull. Ap. Pull. But when she tried to put them together it kept coming out “apap.”

birthday chicken

The story of Birthday, the chicken that ran backwards in circles, began on my daughter Anna’s fifth birthday This was our virgin voyage into the chicken world, and easily enough we got sold on the virtues of “silkie bantams,” a breed known as being fancy “I’m telling you, these are the poodles of the chicken world!” the woman at the feed store said, intending this as a selling point.

It wasn’t, actually, the fancy part that attracted me to silkies. My heart did not go aflutter at the thought of a fluffy chicken with feathers extending clear down its legs and onward to its toes, which, I learned, number five instead of the more typically chicken four, and are black instead of the more typically chicken orange. Also, silkies have blue earlobes. According to the American Silkie Bantam Club, certainly their most
devoted fans, these “beguiling oddities” have charmed people for centuries, most notably Marco Polo, who wrote of them during his journeys to China in the thirteenth century.

And good for him. As for me, I was drawn to the fact that silkies are said to be docile, far more so than your average chicken; with relative ease they will befriend your kids and turn themselves into pets.

So for her fifth birthday, Anna was presented with the gift of four silkie bantam peeps. They were the size of golf balls, two white and two “blue,” a term farm people prefer to the word “gray” whether you are talking chickens or horses or goats. We kept the peeps in a box in our kitchen, and soon enough I made up a list of chicken rules and stuck it on the refrigerator.
BE GENTLE. YOU MUST BE SEATED ON THE FLOOR IF YOU WANT TO HOLD CHICKENS. NO RUNNING WITH CHICKENS. DO NOT DROP CHICKENS. DO NOT CARRY CHICKENS ON YOUR HEAD OR ON YOUR SHOULDERS. IF YOU PUT CHICKENS IN DOLL-HOUSE DO NOT COVER THEM WITH BLANKETS OR LOCK IN LITTLE OVEN. OR LITTLE TOY BOX. OR LITTLE CLOSET
. The list kept getting longer as the chickens grew and the girls could squish them into only increasingly larger enclosures, a kind of a blessing.

Anna named the chickens: Birthday, Mary, Marie, and Shintzee.

“Shintzee?” I said.

“No, Shan-cee,” she said.

“Shan-cee?”

“No, Mommy, Chaun-tee.”

This conversation happens every time. I have no idea what that chicken’s name is.

Birthday’s condition came on suddenly enough. One day we looked in the box and one of the gray chicks looked exactly like what you picture when you say, “She was running like a chicken with her head cut off.”

Her head appeared to be missing. She was just a little feather ball, scooting backwards, around and around and around.

Anna, who already had emerged the best chicken handler of the family by a very long shot, reached in and picked the crazy chicken up. She looked underneath her. “It’s here!” she said. She eased the neck straight and there it was, right where it belonged: Birthday’s head. Birthday looked around, shook that head, and seemed, at that moment, to be back with us. “Well, good,” we all said.

But the next time we looked in the box, there was Birthday, headless and scooting backwards again. The other chicks didn’t seem even a little interested in this apparent fit, except when she bumped into them, and they would simply bump back. The condition did not stop Birthday from eating or drinking or growing, but it was, by anyone’s reckoning, creepy.

“You ever heard of a chicken tucking its head under and running backwards?” I said to Dr. Hurley, our vet. I Googled. I could find no information whatsoever on why a little chick might get stuck in spasms of this or any other sort.

We decided Birthday would grow out of it, kind of like a baby with colic, and every day we hoped, as we got on with our new life as chicken people.

“We have to get them out of the kitchen,” I said to Alex. “We must not become people with chickens in our kitchen.”

“We
are
people with chickens in our kitchen,” he said.

“We must stop,” I said.

We moved the chickens into the living room. The March winds had not died down; it was still too cold for outdoor peep survival. And they were so small and defenseless against our dogs and cats, some of which actually drooled while looking upon them. The worst offender was Marley. It seemed especially insidious to me that a poodle would have dining designs on the poodles of the chicken world.

One morning Anna found Elmo, our orange cat, standing on top of the little chicken box, reaching in. She shouted and scared him off and right then and there her bond with the chickens grew stronger. “Did I save the day?” she said. “Am I the hero?” I told her yes, and yes, and yes, and tried not to worry about her need for validation.

As for Birthday, she scooted backwards and backwards and backwards for nearly a whole day after the Elmo incident. We came to understand the chick’s condition as one of nerves, the spasms most acute during times of stress. Each time, you had to pick her up, ease her neck straight. And each time, from the way she’d shake her head, it seemed she was thankful for the help. “Whew. Thanks. I just couldn’t get it together there….”

Soon enough, as Birthday emerged a full-grown hen, we decided she had a rare neurological disorder like epilepsy that would perhaps affect the quality of her life only in spurts, and this was just who she was.
“Is that chicken okay?!”
people visiting our house would say, horrified by the display of chicken
seizures. And maybe, by simply getting used to it, we became indoctrinated into our new world as chicken people in a full and profound way. Sort of like when you see people at restaurants dining with relatives who have tubes up their noses. These people just go about eating their pork chops, paying no mind to the fact that one of their own is attached to an oxygen tank. At some point they crossed the barrier from these people to
those
people, so fully and completely that they’d forgotten all about it.

This is the kind of chicken people we became. People with chickens in our living room who without fanfare turned into people with chickens living outside in a brand-new chicken coop under the Norway maple. This turned out to be a perfect place for a chicken coop because there was already a picnic table there and so we had a place to sit and watch as they entertained us with their pecking and squawking.

Now,
brooder
is an interesting word. People who worry a lot in silence are known as brooders. But then again so is a hen sitting on her eggs. The more I get to know chickens, the more I realize half our language comes from chickens. Well, not half. But an awful lot considering this isn’t Latin or anything. Cooped up. Egghead. Hatch a plan. Henpecked. Pecker. Cock. Chickenshit. Chicken-scratch. A lot of chicken words are meant to deliver attitude, which isn’t surprising to me now that I have chickens. Chickens aren’t background animals like fish or sheep or horses. Chickens are in-your-face animals. Chickens, if you have them, come to bracket your days. The rooster hollers
all morning, and then in the evening the hens have left you their mysterious gift of eggs.

Silkies are said to be excellent brooders, to have a tendency toward “broodiness.” This, too, is usually meant as a compliment.

Once a silkie hen has decided to set on her eggs, there is very little that will bring her from the nest until those eggs have hatched. Apparently, other breeds of chickens get distracted, or disinterested, or maybe just impatient. But a silkie won’t give up. In fact, a silkie hen will hatch and raise most any kind of poultry or game fowl. Many breeders of quail or pheasant who prefer to hatch naturally as opposed to in an incubator will keep a flock of silkie hens for this purpose. A hen that begins to set is said to have “gone broody.”

I never knew I had an opinion on such matters, but when I learned that silkies were broody, I started loving them. It opened my heart. Sort of like, “Good girl, sitting on your eggs like that!” Here were chickens that inherently understood the sacrifices of motherhood, chickens I could look up to. Wouldn’t, after all, that mama hen rather be out with the boys pecking on the ground for worms and aphids and centipedes? Wouldn’t she? Instead, silkies had a higher calling. Here were chickens who stayed home and brooded.

The women of my mother’s generation stayed home and brooded. The women of my generation got trained out of that value system and were taught to be courageous enough to go out and peck with the big boys. Saying that someone is henpecked nowadays would be more of an insult to the offending female, who surely has better things to do with her time, than
it would be to the subordinate male, who, anyway, has enough to worry about trying to figure out what happened to his almighty cock.

Chicken language, I’m telling you, is everywhere. The average person probably can’t get through a day without having a thought that has some long-lost connection to a chicken.

Anna’s connection was far more literal. Her first summer with chickens was indeed an all-chicken summer. She would sit for hours after dinner, while I gardened and Sasha dug for worms. Anna’s bond with those chickens made my heart leap. Soon I even stopped questioning her judgment as she went about selecting which chicken to put in the bucket of honor. The chicken would fit in that bucket as if in a little nest, only it couldn’t move because the feet didn’t quite reach the bottom. It would just sit there going “bawk bawk,” as a chicken does, while Anna looked at it. Eventually, she would curl up on the picnic table next to it, and tell it stories of the stars or the moon or show the chicken how her tongue had turned green on account of an ice pop.

Naturally, since she was the easiest to catch, Birthday became the chicken most likely to be placed in the bucket of honor, and so you could say she became Anna’s favorite.

Summer probably always does this, but summer slowed me down. I was supposed to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.

Brooding is more something I do when I’m working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We’ve worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos.

Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never thought of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything bigger or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me.