Lifelines

My son has been helping me sift through the stacks of boxes of my mother’s stuff, mostly clothes and kitchen stuff. He has a lot of energy and is good at keeping me on track. He brought one box at a time out of the store room and had me go through the things. He set up three boxes to sort into: throw aways, give aways and keepers. He then divided the keepers into two piles: storage and immediately useful.

I put together a storage box and piled up turtlenecks, shirts and sweaters that I wanted to wear. My son is over forty, but still sometimes manages to make the word Mom into four syllables. He looked at the storage box that I asked him to put into the loft and said, “Mom, I’m going to put that box into storage and then when you die it will still be there and I’ll have to go through it.”

Next he looked at the pile of clothes that I was taking into the house to put away. “Are you going to wear your Mom’s clothes? That’s gross!” I looked down at the turtleneck and flannel shirt that I was wearing. “I’m wearing her clothes now. It’s not weird. It might be weird if you wanted to wear her clothes though.”

I can’t imagine doing a job this hard without him. We are blessed with our children. I know my mother felt the same way. I’m grateful for the gift of laughter that she left us with.

Our hens are about half grown, although they seem huge already to me. They have just discovered our deck and decided that they want to make it home. This is a problem, because just this year I have turned it into extra living space for us. We have a little love seat, a number of chairs, a table with umbrella, and a bed, also with umbrella.

I love my deck. I would rather spend time out there than almost anywhere. The air is fresh and cool, often with a slight breeze that moves our huge wind chimes and creates the most serene music you can imagine. We have little bird feeders next to the bed for gold finches and chickadees and the feed there all day. Hummingbirds come in to taste the nectar from the wild fuchias, the sweet peas and the roses. In the evenings we can lie on the bed and watch the birds go to bed and the bats come out and on a clear night there are more stars than you can imagine.

The hens haven’t discovered the bed yet, but soon they will, and I’m pretty sure it will be their favorite place. I think this because of my experience a few years ago with ducks. We raised four ducks and they became quite tame. We loved them. Their only real job was to keep the bugs down in the garden and to be cute. They performed beyond expectation in both categories. One day we came home and found the ducks in the living room. In those days we left our back door ajar so that the dog could get out if there were an emergency. The ducks figured out how to open the door and walked right in, with the dog. We chased them out, but from that time forward the ducks came in regularly. We could tell they were inside because of the quiet. It’s a strange thing and something I have observed in the chickens as well, when the birds are doing something they know they shouldn’t, they become beyond quiet. Now that I think of it, children do it too.