Our 100 year old, irreplaceable, Dragon Tree listed over and died yesterday. Major loss to our exquisite garden, major blow to Ilse who really knew what a coveted gem it was, dug its majesty every time she stepped out door in back 40 of our wonderland here. Very sad marker of climate woes to come.

As sadness still lingers around the chicken pen, happiness chips and pips it way out of a shell. Recently, some friends brought a chick up to us. It was obviously hand raised because it was so friendly. They had found it dumped at the stable and were worried it was too socialized to humans to dig in with the other chicks. It was a lovely chicken, bright eyes and shiny sable coat. The red of its comb was deep as lipstick and it stuck out loudly from all that black. Our chickens steered clear. There was a vibe around Sparrow. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it. But there was something. One morning a month later it all became clear, Sparrow wasn’t a lovely chicken, he was one slick, bad-ass rooster. We only gave him a week of dawn’s and then he was off to the pet store. His type are highly appraised by some, but mostly roosters are a nuisance. Ilse had suggested eating him to the girls. Bindi, our vegetarian, cried, “No, I love him!” Mette just mused, “He looks gooood.”

In his week of manhood at Skyfarm it seems he did his bidding though. Our once very broody hen, little Silky Cecile, had given up egg sitting by the Spring of this year. She was just getting too old. This would probably be her last year of laying too. This is the same tiny, fluffy champion that two years ago sat on the heirloom turkey egg we had stolen from the Shaker Village Museum in Massachusetts, taken it out between Ilse’s tits and FedExed it home to our waiting little sitter and she did the dutiful trick, 28 days later hatching her little turkey child. Even when it was ten times bigger than her, that turkey was still her little baby, and boy did that turkey howl for her mommy when she finally grew too big for the pen.

And so for all the eggs Cecile’s sat on, and for all the lovely chickens of other decent that she’s surrogated into this world, our little old lady has finally got a babe of her own. Tiny as mommy, black as daddy, kind of fluffy, kind of slick. And just as Skyfarm had lost her proudest of Proud Mary ladies, Aruca, now less than a week later we have little Independence to welcome into the fold. Let’s hope she stays a she….

She was a proud eagle of a chicken. Incredible plumage, a hawk’s gaze, and friendly as a dog. We saved her when someone’s gift of Easter Chicks to their kids got too big, too real. That was seven years ago or more. All her time here at Skyfarm she ruled the roost. She was bigger and smarter than them all. Aruca was an Arucana, a proud breed and she introduced us to our preference for their specialty: big blue eggs. What a lovely lady, and her passing was simple and quiet. She’d been with us longer than Mette has. The epochs go by here in our removed slice of the sky.