Memoir

A couple of weeks ago, a friend mentioned that she and her kids had dyed eggs using silk ties. I’d never heard of doing such a thing, so we decided to give it a try. Keats and I picked out the brightest ties from the Goodwill rack. I sorted through our eggs, reserving the palest brown ones for dyeing. This project is pretty simple, but not the sort we usually do. I tend to focus on the process when we are crafting, especially if the girls are involved because of their ages. The only part of the process that was little kid friendly was using scissors to cut up the ties. After that, this was mostly a mom and big kid intensive craft although it wasn’t difficult and it didn’t take long to prepare a dozen eggs.

I was preoccupied with the stink of those ties the whole time though. We wet them before wrapping them around the eggs and that released an awful smell, that for some reason only bothered me. I don’t think it was related to the silk, because only a couple of them really stank. It wasn’t a random smell either. They smelled like the inside of Bill’s house. I am not sure if I have mentioned him before. (I probably have. I’m bound to start repeating myself here at some point.) Bill was an elderly man whom I was enlisted to help about six years ago, back when I did a lot of catting around as Jonny calls it. Bill lived alone in an isolated little old house. As I pulled up to his house for the first time, I watched cats fly off his front porch and into the trees surrounding the property and knew I was at the right place. Around back another bunch of cats went flying as I approached. Over the course of weeks, I humanely trapped and transported all of Bill’s cats to the vet to be spayed or neutered. In all honesty though, I was more concerned with Bill than I was his cats. I became extremely fond of him (I wanted to buy a house with in- law quarters to move him into. Dear Jonny actually took these wishes of mine seriously.) Bill lived in what I can only describe as deplorable conditions, but beyond letting me clean up his kitchen a few times and take his laundry home to wash (he didn’t have running water) he wouldn’t accept much help. Jonny and I did what we could. Bill didn’t have family, but nearby neighbors eventually helped him get moved into a local nursing home. It took me weeks, but I eventually trapped all of his cats again, and moved them to new homes on farms. His two favorites, “Tweety” and “Nubby,” the only friendly cats in the bunch, ended up on a really nice horse farm. Bill died before I could take him out to the farm for a visit.

It wasn’t my intention to turn a story about doing crafts with my kids into a total downer. I just couldn’t leave out that connection.

Back to the craft: The best part was unwrapping the eggs. Larkspur and I did that part together and we oohed and aaahed at how cool some of the eggs turned out. Here are the directions if you want to try some of these yourself! This really is a pretty neat way to dye eggs!

p.s. In case you wondered what was wrong with Bea’s eyes in the second photo from the top, here’s a better look. Larkspur gave her long luscious blue lashes this morning with a marker. I keep meaning to put a ban on markers at our house, but never follow through. (And the random pink spots are chicken pox of course.)

p.p.s. This has been going on for weeks now, but I am sort of in denial and haven’t wanted to talk about it. Most of my babies walked around their first birthday (I think?) with the exception of Larkspur who waited until about fifteen months. Silas started taking a step here and a step there at 9 1/2 months. I pretended not to notice. Now, at 10 1/2 months he’s walking half the time and I cannot deny it anymore. It’s ridiculous and adorable and he thinks it’s the best trick.

Isn’t that the sweetest little baby Si Si head?

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Before today, I’d only told a friend that they hurt my feelings once in my life that I can recall. I am the type that stuffs it when my feelings are hurt for the most part (unless you’re Jonny-for some reason I have no problem telling him EXACTLY how I feel.) The one time I made an exception to this rule, I actually wrote my friend a letter because I couldn’t face actually telling her. I can’t remember the details, despite the fact that they were terribly important to me at the time, and I was really upset. Essentially I wrote a whole lot that could have been summed up with one sentence: You hurt my feelings when you “x.” Our friendship survived and has become one of those comfortable ones that I plan to grow old with (hopefully she has the same plan that I do!) We still sometimes refer to what is known only as “The Letter.”

A few months ago, a new friend hurt my feelings, but I didn’t tell her. Somehow this one situation erased in my mind the “good times.” I made myself forget how much I had enjoyed hanging out with her, and I guess I forgot that she did seem to like me when we were together. I decided that she must have not ever really liked me to begin with. Doesn’t this sound like high school? Yeah, I know. But don’t we all have growing up to do in some area? As much as I thought it would be easy to call this a friendship “that didn’t work out,” she kept emailing me and even called a couple of times, and the truth is that I like her. It occurred to me that maybe I was wrong about her, and that maybe she was totally clueless that she had hurt my feelings. It’s not like I told her. If you don’t tell someone that they’ve hurt you, it’s not quite fair to just write them off now is it? I realized that I needed to maybe be a big girl and actually say my feelings out loud to her even though that sort of thing totally scares me. So before I could chicken out, I called her. We talked for awhile before I actually got around to telling her that she had hurt my feelings a few months back. Of course after telling her it became clear that she never meant to. I’m glad that I told her. She was glad that I told her. What was I so afraid of?

I realize that none of this goes with chick photos. The chicks were what I meant to write about tonight. So this is for you chicken people, because details are good right? Kind of like the way I have this need to know how much my friends’ new babies weigh, don’t you want to know what breeds of chicks we have this time? Okay, I’ll tell: four Rhode Island Red, six Silver Lace Wyandottes, three Columbian Rock Crosses (there were originally four–Chicky was one of these), and four Ameraucanas. That adds up to 17. I am not sure how that happened because we were talking about getting six chickens this time around, but then decided to go ahead and get twelve. I guess I got confused and added those two numbers together. Oops!

I’m still in the process of reading The Small Scale Poultry Flock but it is already completely influencing the way we are caring for our new flock of chicks. Inspired by Harvey Ussery, our new flock is being fed organic feed that we are supplementing with what we call “salads.” A couple of times each day we prepare a platter of chickweed and dandelion greens for the babies. They love it. Eventually, when they are grown, we plan to reverse that and treat the store bought organic feed as a supplement to their free range diet of insects, scraps, and other forage. I am hoping that Jonny will build a chicken tractor so I can control their foraging this time around and keep them from free ranging in my vegetable garden. We’ll see.