Night Visitors
Tonight I walked down to the chicken
house to close and latch the door before it was completely dark. Locking the
door prevents the midnight varmint marauders from coming in for a chicken
dinner later in evening. The barred rocks heard me coming tonight and knowing
that I always bring the day’s vegetable parings and scraps of uneaten bread from
the kitchen with me to feed them. They raced out of the coup and ran up the
walkway towards me in the near darkness. After some luring and urging I managed
to get them to return to their nightly domicile. The small chicken house and
cage offers scant protection from the varmints hunting a midnight treat but it
is at least better that nothing. Opossums have gained entrance in the past and
have taken their share of the chickens with impunity. Patching the entrance
holes around their run has been a daunting task because when you stop up one
entry way they invariably create another one, by tearing through or digging
under. It has at this point been over a year and a half since I have lost a
chicken to the night visitors. I am getting smarter than the night visitors, at
long last, or so it seems.
The chickens all have names even though I can
rarely tell them apart. There is Pauline, Margaret, Annice and Brunice. All
named for my aunts, who are now diseased. Aside from laying eggs, (which is an excellent
attribute) they weed my garden every winter after I harvest all the fall
vegetables. They are my cleanup crew and what a job they do. By spring and
planting time the garden will be completely weed free. If you are a gardener
you will appreciate the benefits of having unpaid garden assistants devouring
every winter weed that comes up, uninvited and unwanted. There are many weeds
that thrive in the winter months and become quite the pest when planting time
arrives. In addition the chickens turn over every leaf, rock and branch looking
for the abundant bugs, beetles and worms. In their pursuit of the tasty morsels
they also scratch much of the soil in the garden area, almost roto tilling it.
The chickens forage so well they require much less food than when they are
enclosed in their house in milder weather busily laying eggs. Their food is not
cheap, (as in cheap as chicken feed) but all in all they are worth it.
On the short walk back to the house
I noticed in the near darkness a large, drifting blue cloud of smoke coming
from the top of the chimney. It gave me pause to see the beautiful azure cloud
hovering, slowly quaffing upwards like a great wandering apparition just above
the house. The blue smoke ascending and melding with the darkening sky above gave
me comfort knowing that the fire I had prepared earlier was still busy heating
the interior of the house and beckoning me to come back in. Looking back toward
the garden after I reached the house I noticed a huge full glowing silver moon
gently peeping through the trees rising over the top of the mountain just
across the road from our house.
