Chickens Are Polygamists

It's gray and chilly and damp. We had a storm two days ago that swept through with a vengeance, knocking down branches and dumping water and popping the transformer right outside my house.
Now it's going to get cold, I fear, and all my tender plants are outside and I hate that- hauling them in or deciding to let them go. Some of them weigh almost a hundred pounds in their heavy pots, with their bushels of dirt. I should be busy, cutting them back and putting the stems in new dirt to root over the winter in order to save them should I let the mother plants freeze.
Winter.
Bah.
I gave in and had martinis with Mr. Moon last night and I slept from ten to eight-thirty, waking only a few times for hot flashes. I slept with deep thirst for sleep, I slept with fierceness, like Owen does. I look back at the days when my fourth child was born and she was a nursling and I also had a most demanding three-year old and two teenagers and I thought I was dying, I was so tired all the time. I actually went to the doctor and demanded tests. I took care of the children and I nursed my baby and I kept the house and I cooked the meals and I volunteered in the classrooms and I tried to be a decent wife and I think I even worked some at the birth center and Lord have mercy, how did I do that? Taking care of Owen for six or seven hours wears me out in the sweetest sort of way and even after his father comes to get him and we go outside to talk to Mr. Moon I follow his face and try to make him smile at me because I can't get enough of him, no matter what.
And then I remember how back in those days when my own babies were young I got up at five thirty to walk the dark streets, to get my exercise in. I did that! I look back on all of that and I realize that I did something and I was far stronger than I believed I was.

And now when Owen is here, I have nothing I have to do but love him and I realize the worth of grandmothers and I know I am doing something again. Something important and if we spend half an hour on the porch swing, watching the sky and trees as I kick us back and forth and back and forth, doing nothing but that, it is enough and more than enough.

I had a test yesterday on who I love the most- Owen or the chickens and Owen won. I had inadvertently let Sam out and he was trying to get Miss Betty and I had Owen in my arms and I laid him down on a blanket in the grass to try and get her in the hen house and Owen began to scream in protest in being set down and I looked from Betty to Owen and I scooped him up and said, "Good luck, Betty," and we came into the house for a bottle.
Betty lived.

I learned something yesterday about chickens. I feel like a chicken anthropologist. I had Sam in the coop and his hens were outside yesterday for a good while and I could tell that Sam was a bit frantic to get to his ladies. When he got out and got back with them, they clustered around him with great relief and he scratched and found morsels and fed them to his hens who took them from his beak and after a few moments of that, he began to mount them, one after the other.
Ahah! Chickens are polygamists! Those hens and that rooster looked like nothing more than a group of women around their man, looking up to him for sustenance, and then for mating which, perhaps, is comforting to them as well as him. Hard to say, hard to tell. It doesn't look like much, that quick jump on their backs, the beak to the head, the quick flutter and fluff of feathers and then he jumps off and they settle themselves back together, like ladies after a quickie in the pantry, pulling their skirts straight, checking their hair before they go back out to company.

I don't know. I can't judge. The hens are perfectly capable of finding their own tender morsels in the dirt and they do but they seem to cherish those bits from Sam's mouth and it's all part of their society, their way of life. It's so interesting to observe this entire other culture living in my backyard. I feel like the Spaceman in this reading we're doing tonight, taking notes on the strange customs of another race.

I think about that, how there is so much other life going on around us all the time and we people, we humans, we hairless apes, think we're so complicated and cool with our big brains and big TV's and our big cars and our Big Gulps and even as we think all of this, the simplest things are doing what they do, down to the fungus growing in the old oak tree at the edge of the property, creating a something that looks like it should be formed under the sea out of nothing but a few cells, some rotting wood, some dampness.


I hold Owen in my arms and we walk around and we look at all of this. Me with my grown-up, semi-educated eyes and he with his brand new ones and I think about how much we are going to learn together, he and I. I think about how he makes me slow down and pay attention. I show him things and he tells me when he is ready to move on. We are learning about cultures and I am part of the human culture- a grandmother- and I realize I am, as a grandmother, important.

Well. It's gray and damp and chilly. I have to go to town today. I am, as we all know, loathe to leave my tiny place here on earth, but sometimes it must be done. Owen is with his mama today and on Saturday he'll be with his other grandmother and do you want to know a secret? I am bitterly jealous, which makes no more sense than the hens being so grateful to Sam for those bites of food from his mouth. No more sense than Sam's seeming unreasonable hatred for Betty.

We humans. We think we're something.
And we are.
I learn more about us every day as I walk through the yard with a baby in my arms, observing chickens and trees and fungus and the sky. I have gone back to school, it seems, even as my arms and body offer themselves up in such an old familiar way to this new boy. He offers me new eyes as I offer milk from a bottle and clean diapers and new sights for him to wonder at.
We wonder together and we are both learning.

And isn't that amazing? And isn't that important? And aren't I the luckiest woman on earth?

Happy Friday, y'all.

Love...Ms. Moon