Category Archives: Wendy Welch

The Chicken or the Egg?

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Jack getting his guest post in on time is a rare event – – –

Some regular readers will know that we have chickens free-ranging in our backyard, four to be precise. Two (Thelma and Louise) came in March and settled in easily, exploring their new surroundings and quickly began laying an egg each per day.

Then, more recently we received another two – retired government workers! They had been employed to track any evidence of West Nile Virus by having their blood tested regularly. After their stint is finished these chickens are re-homed to people who must promise not to eat them. They quickly settled in as well and within days had become good buddies with the original two. We christened one of the newbies ‘Elissa Hirple’ because she was limping when she came and the other one ‘Kathy’. But we didn’t see any eggs from them! (Also Ms. Hirple overcame her limp.)

Being novice chicken owners we did some research on their laying and found that it’s related to the amount of daylight they experience. When the days get shorter and darker they are likely to stop and about a week ago that seemed to have happened. I stopped seeing eggs in the usual corner of the coop I’d converted from an old outhouse.

When we stopped seeing the usual two per day we resigned ourselves to not getting any until Spring. When we were getting eggs regularly, Wendy preserved a couple dozen using a method involving pickling lime called ‘glassing.’

I still checked each day just in case they might provide an occasional egg, but nothing, and we began to talk about when we would break into the glassed eggs. Then yesterday as I refilled their food and water, I happened to look in a different corner of the coop and to my astonishment there were fifteen eggs. So they hadn’t stopped at all and it is almost certain that either Elissa or Kathy joined the production line!

So we now have two large containers of glassed eggs sitting on the counter, and we are still enjoying three-egg days.

The Monday Bookshelf

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This week’s Monday Book is the 1847 Proceedings of the Virginia House of Delegates. I spent the weekend decoupaging a bookshelf with it.

Creativity is the product of sublimated aggression. And Saturday I just needed to do something different with my life. So I papered a bookcase–literally.

Some of the pages were bills and their readings. Some were budget reports. The state was $4 million in debt in 1847. Some were assessments of income on how they were making up that revenue. Taxes and such. Income from criminal properties seized by the state. Which included people.

The second shelf holds the two-page report of female prisoners, ages 14-66, by number of women in each age bracket, and the occupations they had been put to work in at the prison. Several spinners, some dyers, a couple of weavers, etc. I put it face side up, where books would sit on top of it but I could look over and just see the entry on the edge of the shelf: 14-20, 6, spinners, income–and then it’s lost under the next page.

Ezekiel 34: 1-4 discusses shepherds who tend the sheep entrusted to their care, versus those who strip them of their wool, their dignity, their lives:

The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? 3 You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. 4 You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally.

A friend said I should have burned the book. Nope. It’s a coded message that will sit in the shelf for all time: this is why we vote. Justice for all, or justice for none; make space for the voiceless, or expect to lose your voice. No matter who wins–or when the winner is declared, by whom–I will know that message on the shelf.

Vote carefully.