Too Many Chickens

I LOVE SPRING!!! Ok, I don’t love every aspect of it…like the tornados and floods and spiders and mosquitoes…but I always feel so alive and full of hope and promise when the world starts turning green. As much as I complained about working on the farm when I was growing up you’d think I’d be glad that I live in town now (if you can really call the spot in the road where I live a town…lol), but there is always this compelling urge…a deep undeniable yearning for creative cultivation. Starting in early February I begin collecting this stack of catalogues from the mail…full of pictures of flowers and trees and vegetables and growing supplies…some even come with planting diagrams…which I always find fault with and can spend hours improving…on graft paper that I keep handy because I never know when I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a blueprint I’ve dreamed up and need to sketch before I fall back to sleep (my chickens never roost!…lol). Anyway…I devour these publications…slowly savoring the selection of shrubs…perusing perfect perennials…envisioning a voluminous variety of tasty tomatoes and succulent squash. I leaf through them again and again…comparing prices, colors, heirlooms and hybrids. My yard is, for the most part, a sad combination of ash and clay…I can’t seem to use enough Miracle Grow to coax the tiny sprouts into adulthood. One year I went as far as to buy a truck load of landscape timbers and bags of topsoil to build a small raised garden out back. I’ve never had such a fine crop of dandelions as I did that year…lol. Last year I decided that my grandson was old enough to appreciate this miracle of nature and wanted to share the whole experience with him. He has helped me in the yard since he was big enough to walk…pulling weeds (and the occasional flower…lol)…raking up the leaves so we can play in them…and packing sticks after a storm (which we have had more than our share of lately). He loves watching the flowers turn into berries in his little strawberry patch, and can’t wait for the tiny green tomatoes to show up so he can pick them off and throw them…lol. I got a couple of the cheap plastic starter boxes…the ones with the peat pellets in them, some tomato, zucchini, and yellow squash seeds, and mentally prepared for science class. It wasn’t long before he got bored with the planting process…I mean after you stick a couple of seeds in the peat it gets kinda repetitive, and 3 yr olds aren’t known for their long attention spans (especially in this family!!!). Every time he came over he would run to check on our project. I know the days it took for those seeds to sprouts were years in his world. When anyone came to the house he would proudly show off our garden to be and tell them all about how we stuck the seeds in the dirt stuff and he had to make sure they always had water and that we were gonna put them outside when they got bigger. When the day for transplanting finally arrived we gathered our tools and sprouts and got to work. After the ground was ready and the seedlings were gently placed in their holes, I left him to stand guard while I went back in to get more water. When I got back he proudly showed me that he had helped while I was gone….he showed me how he had stepped on each tender delicate plant so that he could push it in the ground better for me. The glowing smile on his face kept the dismay I felt from showing…I thanked him for trying to help and explained that next time maybe we shouldn’t push them in so hard, and with a resigned sigh…made plans to buy seedling and replace them the next day…lol. I can hardly wait until my granddaughter is older so I can share my love of nature with her as well. I’m really missing my daughter right now because (even though she fought it for years…lol) she shares this need to work the warm earth…to touch the renewed life of spring. And it isn’t truly spring until we squish mud between our toes…lol.

I just found out that I have health issues that I knew nothing about and now I get to take a pill every morning for the rest of my life or at least until GOD decides to fix me. I…like so many other people I know…don’t have any health insurance so I don’t do the whole preventive yearly check up and stuff. I had signed up to be a lab rat for a study this research center is doing (I gotta make some money somehow…lol) and they had to do some testing to make sure I qualified. It turns out that this time I actually got paid to go to the Doctor instead of paying him…the ultimate health care plan…lol.
Speaking of health care…I don’t want to get into a huge political statement kind of thing because I am not as informed as I should be (I tend to lose focus when I try to read articles about politics, and all the blah blah blah spewed out by the media just pisses me off!) but I do have my opinions about what the government should be doing for us and it ain’t happening. Sometimes it seems that public officials spend more time making sure they’re saying politically correct things and shaking the right hands than they spend doing the job we hired them to do. It actually scares me to think where this country started and where it looks like we’re headed. The concept of freedom has been twisted to fit so many platforms that none of us are truly free anymore. I am nondenominational and nonpartisan…I think that if we spent less time segregating our beliefs and values, and more time using moral common sense it would make a huge improvement. As long as everyone keeps looking out for themselves with no concern for the people they stomp on along the way, things are only going to get worse instead of better. I’m not sure that society really understands or even recognizes the blurred line between right and wrong anymore.

I have decided to stick to my hunt and peck style of expression for a little while longer..I can’t afford a new laptop and if that stupid voice recognition progam keeps up it’s rebelious attempt to prove me inferior I may throw it across the room and jump up and down on it!!! After completing the redundant tutorial and spending over an hour reading to my spiteful little computor…it still refuses to accept my drawl or acknowledge my sincere attempts at interactive communication….I’m ready to stick my microphone up its output jack.

Anyway… I have been sooo busy trying to keep my life in some sort of order (as well as trying to meddle in my friend’s and family’s business) that I have completely lost what little ability I had to complete the smallest task. I feel like my feathered flock is in overdrive!!! My youngest child is getting ready to move across the country and has been sorting and packing for a month now. With me trying to help her, we have both managed to create numerous stacks of clothing and stuff that she may or may not take…as well as a couple of stack she is pretty sure she isn’t taking. She had her own house and it was full…now most of it has been moved here to my overly furnished home. The lines of ownership are becoming vague now because everything has begun this odd blending or melding process. We both suffer from packratitis…it seems to be genetic also…and I believe it is a side effect of the chickens because I have noticed a direct correlation between the size of the flock and the size of the collection. We can’t throw anything away because you never know when it may be exactly what you need and why would you want to have to go buy it again? And besides that…they might not even make it anymore so at that point you would have to completely redo it all. I know this disorder has been passed down through at least six generations and have personally seen it exhibited in the last five. I can remember my Grandmother’s collection of what ifs. She had a cupboard full of little butter containers, egg cartons, straws, rubberbands, bread ties, and other kitchen type collectables. One room of her four room home was dedicated to storage. There were all types and colors of fabric scraps for mending anything that come along as well as creating her handmade quilts…old broken wire hangers that wouldn’t support cloths anymore, but were irreplaceable when it came to repairing things…one cabinet full of wood scrapes that she had saved over many years, and there always seemed to be one just the right size to fix what ever needed fixing…and dusty overfilled boxes that I never got to the bottom of because I always got distracted by some treasure along the way. When my Mamma passed away at 101 years old, my Mother ended up with a lot of these boxes. She has them stored along with many more of her own, and I imagine that someday they will all end up here. Along the journey some things have been tossed away (not without reservations) and new things gathered, some generously bestowed to others deemed worthy, and some woefully misplaced forever. It is a rippling stream of history. Now my grandson enjoys going through my stuff and asking me about each piece as he examines it. Who knows…by the time he has kids it could be worth a fortune on Ebay!