After all, we have boundaries Mr. Rooster
When we got our 28 baby chicks back in March of this year, they all looked the same — yellow, marshmallow peeps that you could have easily crushed in the palm of your hand (I know that’s kind of morbid, but it’s where my mind goes). When the chicks arrived, we could not tell one chick from the next even though I was desperate to start naming them. Over the weeks and months, some of the chicks began to get colorful feathers, grow waddles and begin to stand out from the others. Slowly, the names emerged from the group — there is Cher and Dino (who looks very prehistoric) and Maria and Sirius Black and Ye-Haw. Cher is the strangest looking bird, she has long, slender grey legs and an awkward neck with a head that appears to have a bob haircut. (I sing her Cher’s biggest hits and she seems to enjoy it.) Cher just stands out from the rest of the flock, perhaps she is born for the stage.
Over the months, however, some of the other chickens began to really stand out. As you know, one rooster emerged from the flock and then, all of a sudden there were four roosters. Roosters seemed to be emerging out of our flock like adolescent armpit hair — one moment there were no roosters and then, rooster chaos. Suddenly, we had testosterone filled roosters who wanted to climb onto the backs of our ladies and insert their potent seed. They were becoming sexual and primal birds! What had happened to our innocent ladies? Maria was no longer Maria but turning into a beautiful and handsome rooster right before our eyes. Her (I think I will always use feminine pronouns for this bird) tail began to rise above the other birds, her speckled coat began to glow and her comb began to adorn her head like a regal crown.
Luckily, Maria is not very aggressive. Her rooster crow is high-pitched and faint. It is not the guttural and throaty sound of the first dude who made himself known as a rooster in our flock. That first rooster was huge — a Rhode Island Red rooster with a dark green tail and a confident strut. I am using the past tense because he is no longer with us. No, we did not kill him but we did give him away to our neighbors who needed a rooster for their flock. Not only was this rooster mounting our hens, but he was pecking them, biting them and generally causing our flock a whole lot of stress. So, he had to go. After all, we have boundaries Mr. Rooster.
Even though this rooster was aggressive, it was still sad for me to see him go. We raised him, wiped his ass when he was learning how to use his colon and watched him turn from a delicate peep into a primal beast. I was attached to him — bully or not. When our neighbors drove up in their green Toyota pick-up with a small dog kennel in the back, I felt a pang of sadness. I felt a wave of loneliness as we watched them take our rooster away, smiling and waving to us as they drove slowly down the driveway.
Since our main rooster has been gone, our flock has quieted way down. We seem to have lessened the stress on our hens a great deal and even better, they have started to lay more eggs. They are calmer, quieter and more productive — it seems their nervous systems have gone back to a baseline and we can all take a deep breath around here on the farm. Nevertheless, I might be writing rooster poetry for a while.
Yesterday, on a spontaneous trip to Santa Fe in which I took our car to the shop for a new battery, I stopped in at the plant nursery on my way home. This is one of my favorite stops that I almost never get to do because I usually have the car loaded with plywood and groceries along with a wheelbarrow and copious amounts of wood chips. But yesterday, I got to wander through the plant nursery in all her glory — through the rose gardens, the cactus greenhouse and the lavender fields while the butterflies and hummingbirds flapping around me. I am always inspired and profoundly excited to bring home color to our farm. The plant nursery is full of unimaginable color, color that I know takes dozens of hands to make possible. I bought one tangerine colored rose bush, one lavender plant, one bright purple butterfly bush and a blooming red basket of hanging flowers for our front porch. I want color and I want color now. Summer in the desert can be very brown. We are in-between the spring rains and the summer monsoons and things are looking DRY.
The more we plant on our property, the more we see rabbits, squirrels and rats running by with some kind of stem hanging from their mouths. The other day, a squirrel ate my entire hollyhock plant that took me one month to grow. Time means everything on the farm and something that takes 30 days of watering to grow can be decimated in thirty seconds. That is why, the cats are coming to the farm. They are on their way. If I had not bought four enormous bushes and placed them in my backseat yesterday, I would have gone to the animal shelter and picked up our cats. As I was flipping through the local paper the other day, I saw my cat — the cat with one eye. I love a one-eyed cat maybe as much as I love a three-legged dog. I want this one-eyed cat to be one of our cats, fierce and feisty. I will call her Ol’ Captain. She will be the leader of the barn cats and initiate the hunts for the rats, the squirrels and the rabbits. She will be the protector of our hollyhocks from here on out.
I have never had outdoor barn cats. All of my cats have always laid to rest on the corner of my pillows and on the kitchen floor in a sliver of warm light but these cats will be different. They will be purposeful and useful, they will be part of our farm team. But on really cold nights, I will sneak them into the house by the fire and pet them while they purr, spoon feeding them cream and warm milk. Don’t worry Ol’ Captain, I’ve got you.
Because I am a person who is acutely aware of death (did I throw you with the change of topic), I really appreciate brining new life onto the property. I think it is one of the antidotes or the remedies for my intensity and awareness of death. I am anxiously aware that my time on this planet is impermanent and because of that, I want all the flowers, gardens, kittens, baby chicks, piglets and cows that I can get. Maybe it’s the emphasized Pluto in my chart that indicates my intimate relationship with death, maybe it’s that my soul remembers times when life was not so easy and death was all around. When I was in sixth grade, I was oddly obsessed with The Black Plague and studied it for a long time. There was something eerily familiar to me about the sudden and devastating wipe out of human communities. So, I like to keep life close to me. I like to snuggle close to my chicks and piglets and I feel sad when any animal leaves us — I want to revel in the animal breath of life because for now, we are all here and we are all bursting with life.
