There are two ways you can buy baby chicks at the feed store. “Straight run” means they haven’t been sexed, and the likelihood of getting a rooster is 60%. “Sexed” means a professional has decided on its gender, and the margin of error is 2–10%. So when hubby brought home a white chick he called Ugly Betty (see my post on The Ugly Box), I should have known then and there that 2% would raise its ugly head.

You see, I’ve had bad luck with white birds. The first one was, yes, a rooster. The second was a girl, a rescue from the animal shelter. She had been abused in a playground by nasty horrible children who I hope meet a fitting end, and actually had bicycle tire marks on her little wings. Turns out she was a meat bird, who are genetically engineered to grow huge by 8 weeks … so huge their legs can’t hold them up and sometimes actually break. The little love didn’t survive her DNA.

Which brings me to my third white bird, Ugly Betty. Who is lovely, and sweet natured, and comes when you call, and … who sat on my shoulder the other evening and crowed in my ear. The 2% strikes again!

My DH has a strict no-rooster policy. But as I explained to him, you can’t rescue a bird from the Ugly Box and then give it away when it isn’t what you want. So now that Betty has become Benny, we’re adopting a wait-and-see policy. If Benny turns out to be as quiet as he’s begun, he may be able to stay here instead of going to the home DH has arranged for him. It’s a good home, and he’d be happy there, it’s just that . . .

. . . I love the little guy.

Yesterday my husband was in the feed store to pick something up, and saw that the brooding pen for the latest shipment of chicks was empty. “No more chicks this year?” he asked.

The clerk jerked a thumb around the corner. “No, there’s a couple left. They’re in the Ugly box.”

The Ugly box. Where the unchosen go. The ones that no one picks to take home.

The Ugly box is where chicks go when they grow out of the adorable fuzzball stage, and turn into adolescents with legs that are too long, spiky feathers that are too uncomfortable, and beaks that are too big for their faces. I don’t know about you, but if there had been an Ugly box for kids when I was fourteen, I’d have been in it. Legs that were too long, a faceful of zits, glasses that were too big for my face. Yep. I was a prime candidate for the Ugly box, and in junior high, there was no shortage of people to tell me so.

Fortunately, there’s a cure for the Ugly box, and that’s time. At four weeks, a chick will begin looking more svelte and put-together. It will still have its “peeper voice,” but its feathers will have grown out and it will be more confident in its body (that’s Dinah and JoJo at four weeks. Weren’t they lovely?)

But in the meantime, in a feed store in town, there are two lonely chicks in the Ugly box. And my husband just left with the chicken carrier in the back of the truck.

I wonder what that means?

“On Monday, Farmer Greenstalk dropped his watch down the well … Who will come to the rescue? Would you believe … chickens? Believe it! The amazing chickens on the Greenstalk farm race to help various family members every day of the week … every day until Sunday, that is, when Emily Greenstalk has a little trouble. John Himmelman’s expressive illustrations make the most of each heroic chicken moment.”

I admit it: I adore picture books. The only thing better than a picture book is a picture book about chickens—and this book is probably my all-time favorite.

The story is just crazy enough to appeal to kids (“On Thursday, Ernie the duck drove off with the farmer’s truck. Chickens to the rescue!”) while the watercolors on each page suck you in as you hunt for your favorite chicken. Mine is the one who is asleep in every panel, an egg either under her or close by. Then, in the final panel, she’s awake with a kind of smiling pride in her eye, and next to her is a newly hatched baby chick.

Himmelman has a number of picture books out in the same vein, in which pigs and cows also come to the rescue, but he has some nonfiction nature books too. But Chickens to the Rescue will stay on my A-list of chicken books, because it’s so well done and it makes me laugh every single time.

In a recent essay on The Awl, Maria Bustillos said something that resonated with me:

“The key difference between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Violet Winspear is—the beard, obviously, but in terms of literary production, the difference is that the latter is thinking more about you, the reader, whereas the former is thinking more about himself, the author. Each approach has an enormous value, potentially. To put this another way, Dostoevsky writes from deep inside himself, about his whole life, every single thing he ever saw or learned; Winspear plies her craft according to what she imagines it would please you to read, imagine or dream about, though it’s nearly impossible for a novelist to avoid revealing some of his own ideas and beliefs about the world, however tangentially.

“It doesn’t matter whether you call this “serious” literature or not, really, though it seems to me that when millions and millions of people are involved in the same reading, it is very serious indeed.”

This on the heels of a conversation I had not long ago with an aspiring author. He wanted to know how to get published, and when he kept going on about “my voice” and “being heard” and “my work,” I stopped him. “It’s about the readers,” I said. “What do you have to offer them?” But he didn’t want to talk about that. He didn’t even want to talk about my experience, he only wanted to talk about his work and “being heard.”

At which point I terminated the conversation because

1. When someone asks for your help and then doesn’t listen when you try to speak, I don’t know about you, but I get the feeling they’re more interested in the sound of their own voice than in hearing yours.
2. The aspiring author who is going to succeed is a teachable one who’s willing to absorb the experiences of others and learn from them.
3. If an author doesn’t have his reader in mind when he writes, then it doesn’t matter if he’s published or not. He’s just engaging in a form of, oh, I don’t know, mental masturbation, where it’s all about him.

Not that I’m accusing Dostoevsky of such things, but you get what I mean. When writing isn’t about communicating what’s in your head to someone else’s head in as vivid and compelling a way possible, when it’s not about the reader, then what are we writing for? We want to share, don’t we? Not because we want to be venerated by an adoring public (though it would be nice to have a public), but because we’re saying, “Look! I made a playground! Come and play with me.”

Here in California, we have two seasons: rainy season and fire season. Where the edges of those two meet, you have spring and fall, but only briefly, before you get to the main event, both of which last for months.

This year, though, we seem to have dispensed with winter and are having a nice long spring that’s gone from November until now. In fact, the only way I could tell it was winter was by the neighbor’s persimmon tree, whose fruit ripens after the first frost. Rumor has it there was a frost, anyway … I must’ve missed it.

I don’t care much for persimmons, but the chickens adore them. They’ll run across the road each day to see what fruit has fallen on the ground, and they’ll fight over the squishy bits.

I know that you can make persimmon cookies and persimmon bread, but honestly? I get way more pleasure out of watching the chickens enjoy them than eating them in any form myself. It’s a sacrifice I’m more than willing to make.

I’ve been rescuing chickens for ten years, but even now I make mistakes.

Millie

Witness poor Millie.

She was molting for the first time and feeling pretty miserable, so at bedtime I put her up on the “safety platform,” which is just a glorified storage shelf, above where the other birds roost. Since Millie is low bird on the totem pole, she likes it up there. No one can whack her while she’s sleeping. In the morning, I went to help her down, but she was reluctant to step into my hands to be lifted down. So I caught her feet and tried to get her down when she wasn’t ready.

Big mistake. She flew out of my grip, panicked, and landed badly on top of the waterer. She spent the next three days in the hospital box, recovering from a bruised leg, shock, and maybe a pulled muscle. I felt awful. I spent those three days apologizing while I offered her treats—a cut strawberry, a few blueberries, a nice bit of fish. She is the sweetest natured girl, and hurting her is the last thing I ever wanted to do. Lesson learned: the bird will fly down when she’s ready. Don’t force the issue just because you’re in a hurry.

Cut to two days later. I’m sitting in the sun and Millie jumps up in my lap for a snuggle, just as she always has. After a week of self-recrimination, and watching her to make sure she’s healing and what I’ve done isn’t permanent, I finally feel forgiven. She still loves me, even if her leg hurts.

She’s nearly completely healed now. And I learned my lesson the hard way.

The autumn equinox has just passed, bringing falling leaves, too much zucchini … and molt. There are feathers everywhere. Egg production is down. And rampant crankiness prevails in the coop.

Chickens molt every year at about this time. Some go through a “catastrophic molt,” where they lose nearly all their feathers and run around looking like pincushions as the pinfeathers, or waxy tubes containing the new feathers, protrude through their skin. I can’t imagine how painful and itchy this must be. All I know is that trying to hold a bird covered in pinfeathers will make her screech and flap to escape, no matter how gently you  do it.

Some birds molt in patches. Kirby loses the fluff on her bum first. Copper’s neck is the first to go. Millie just loses patches all over her body, so she looks raggedy and unfinished. This is her first molt, too. My baby is all grown up! (That’s her in the picture, at about three months.)

At the moment, Aida is so sensitive that she can’t even sleep with the other birds for fear someone will jostle her and make her hurt. So in the evening when I tuck them in, she gives me a speaking look and glances up at the storage shelf, where I keep the spare cages and feeders. I lift her up there, and with a sigh of relief, she settles down to sleep knowing that nobody is going to mess with her in the night—even accidentally.

Penny, who passed away a couple of years ago, was a gorgeous wheaten (gold) Ameraucana. She was a beauty queen and she knew it. Molting season was a trial to her soul—there were days she wouldn’t even come out of the coop because she looked so bad. She would wait it out until her feathers came in, and then she’d take her place again in the flock.

Molt. It happens. And when it does, there’s nothing you can do but live through it.

Magic the horse and the buggy I drove in Intercourse, PA

Over the long weekend I got a little reading done, and I noticed a funny thing. In three consecutive books I read the phrase, “giving him/her/it free reign,” meaning the subject had freedom to do what it wanted. Only … that’s not the right word. REIN is the right word, not REIGN. Authors only have words to use as their tools. As part of our craft it’s vital that we use the right tools, the same way a mechanic wouldn’t use an Allen wrench when a socket wrench is called for.

So then I thought, okay, these are three published books, and if anyone knows how many rounds of editing these go through, it’s me. So how could it go through edit, copyedit, and proof, and no one catch the error? Could it be because no one knows it is an error? Am I just being anal? Or—gasp!—am I the one who’s wrong?

Turns out I’m not. I’m anal, but that’s to be expected in a copyeditor. According to Merriam-Webster, “free rein” means “unrestricted liberty of action or decision,” and it’s what you do with a horse when it knows its way home and you don’t need to direct it.

Take Magic, for instance, the horse who pulled the buggy I was driving in Lancaster County. Magic was very patient with this greenhorn. He could obviously tell that the experienced hands of Omar, his usual driver, were not on the reins. At one point I got so busy talking that it took me a minute to realize Magic was running the show himself, and the reins lay limp on his back while we trotted down the country road.

Free rein. We’ve gotten so far from horses as part of our transportation that we no longer know how to use even the phrase correctly. I bet the Amish do, though.

You’ve seen it—that soupy berry pie that runs all over the plate when you cut it, and your guests have to eat the mess with a spoon? Not even ice cream will save it. Well, here’s the solution. This pie will never fail you. I call it “neighborly” because you just want to invite everyone over to have some

Neighborly Blackberry Pie

5 cups fresh blackberries
1/4 cup flour
2/3 cup sugar
2 tsp tapioca
1 1/2 Tbsp lime or lemon juice
1/4 tsp cinnamon, if desired (I leave it out)
2 pie crusts (and Pillsbury is just as good as homemade, so there)

Toss first 6 ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Fill lower crust with mixture and dot with 2 Tbsp butter. Lay top crust on, crimp, and vent.

Bake at 450F for 10 minutes, then lower to 350 for 30-40 minutes. Serves 6-8.

Blackberry season is in full swing. I’m not a big fan of cake, so for my birthday I decided to make pies. Blackberry pies. Do you know how long it’s been since I got out and picked them from anywhere but the produce aisle?

In my neighborhood, drivers actually have to slow down near the bigger bramble patches, because you never know when someone with a plastic container is going to step out onto the road, so focused on the next ripe berry that they forget to look. And “where are they ripening this week?” is a common question when neighbors meet each other while walking their dogs. Even the chickens have gotten into it, heading for the bramble in our backyard and checking to see whether the ones they can reach are ripe yet.

My neighbor came and got me early in the morning, and off we went to a prime patch he’d discovered the day before. In the half hour it took to pick 8 cups of blackberries for my pies, I had time to slow down and think about what I was doing. And I decided that that big old hill of brambles had something to tell me.

1. No matter how much you have, there’s always something better just out of reach. Decide whether it’s worth the pain, come up with an approach strategy, and go for it.
2. There’s nothing wrong with low-hanging fruit, unless there are a lot of dogs.
3. Sometimes the best fruit is hidden by leaves. Don’t be afraid to slow down and really look.
4. Prickles are inevitable. Arm yourself in advance and you won’t feel them.
5. Be prepared to succeed. Don’t short yourself with a small container.
6. You can see lots by looking down. But don’t forget to look up and see what’s there, too.

There’s nothing so good as a pie you gathered the fruit for yourself. On Tuesday I’ll post my no-fail blackberry pie recipe!