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….

It’s been an amazing 7 years. She been here since the inception of the farming idyll. She was our first layer and the last of the tiny threesome we brought home to our daughter’s bedroom so long ago. So much farm has built up around them in the meantime, some serious work has gone into the the palace making for these feathered ladies. Mommy had it good here. We saved her from an alchi in Riverside. She was the size of a golf ball when we brought her home. All fluff. Many great poached eggs have gone under this roof in her honor over the years. All hail the quietus of Mommy Chicken, the long standing Mother of The Brood!

And my CHICKS do it so damn well.

When Ave and I build a chicken pen for all the little hippie kids in Eagle Rock, we don’t fuck around.

And thus the eagle has landed safely in the clutches of Sky Farm’s most Laura Ingalls Wilder bosom.