Girl you know it's true

She was intent on staying passive, pretty sure she should not struggle against the grip that held her in place before the officiant. Her handler was a stranger and had one hand around her neck. It was in this choice-less manner that she was becoming officially betrothed. The guitarist played here comes the bride softly and the tune felt a bit heterogeneous as it hung on wisps of the afternoon 2 o'clock winds. But, no matter, all eyes were on him anyway, the Viceroy. He commanded all the attention that otherwise should have been given to her. She hated that. But, Honey was not ashamed of the arrangement and she hid her suffering well. She was here, bathed and dressed, ready to become a wife. In her own way, she even kind of liked the Viceroy even though she was nearly alone in her endearment, he could be mean, violent even. Nearly everybody, except, of course for me, knew that about him. I loved Viceroy. I loved him in spite of him not loving me back. The sheen of his ceremonial saddle reflected greenish purple against the long rays of sunshine christening this day with light. He was so shiny and black that it took my breath just to look upon him. There was no disputing the perfection the Viceroy had attained with his devil may care stance. My unrequited admiration wasn’t pain, it was love. Besides, I was just the caterer for this particular event. This day was for her.

It was our second chicken wedding and life on our little farm was in full bloom. Viceroy, a Black Rosecomb and Honey, a wheaton Old English Game, were being married by my 9 year old. She had invited friends, neighbors and fellow 4-h poultry people. It was fun. Post ceremony, the two lovebirds, in a familial Phasianidae order of operations, removed themselves from the festivities to love on each other and get on with the business of producing a flock of egg layers. We live in an butter and eggs mecca and we wanted to be part of the tradition.

Good ‘ole little bantam wheaton Honey sat dutifully upon her eggs forgoing social time and sunshine for nearly a month while my daughter tended to her every need. It all went according to plan just as it was exhaustively explained in the Standards of Perfection handbook - in 24 days she hatched them eggs. When a chicken is hatched you cannot tell right away if it will be a pullet (hen) or a cockeral (cock). There is a way to sex the birds after a few days but we typically just pray for girls and wait for a cockledoodledoo as our scientific verification. Viceroy fertilized and Honey hosted all the eggs turning and protecting them until three mixed breed fighting machines were invited into our world. Roosters, all three. Just our bad luck. At first we called them the Dothraki as they quickly grew to be the most fierce and most striking birds this side of Westeros, this being 2012 in the year of our Lord or more commonly referred to as GOT season 2. This band of brothers instilled a sense of arresting majesty in the early morning light and primal fear at dusk. We consulted ancient texts and celebrity magazines looking for names to match each of their mogul star status to pinpoint the essence of their charm and machismo. It was better than tv, just to watch them strutting around, raping and preening in our backyard. After much discussion our daughter named them: Coke, Pepsi and Oreo. Because, well, family. Love wins.

Chicken weddings are the stuff of a little farm girl's dreams. Make believe and real worlds flock together to make a soft and fluffy family memory. Collective memory holds more love than self induced memory precisely because it can be shared and embellished with new and evolving details over time making it a tapestry rather than a single threaded needlepoint replica of time. Animals do this well too. Animals weave in a layer of love and comfort that makes life a little extra. Outside of orbiting my own little moon unit, when I climb in my rocket and go to other realities I have to slipstream between the churdish molecule balls of of the working world with a fortified suit. Otherwise, I get caught up in the flywheel and spin out feeling greasy and unevenly pressed, like a school lunch grilled cheese. I just don’t like how my own corners meet up when I’m out there with “everybody”. I don’t naturally slide into that communal sense of belonging that my town extolls in the weekly paper. I see the feature stories of women farmers and I see myself knocking on their door but I don't read the whole article. I caught the short attention virus long before the internet gave it to the rest of the universe. I used to make tv commercials so it's hard to escape my own attachment to a 30 second drive by branding for everyone and everything. It's cold comfort that everyone does it now thanks to social media. Ha. At the feed store my boots are properly muddied but my car is too clean and without a Ford F-150 pick up truck, I’m forced to deflect sideways glances from cowboys while putting hay in my hybrid hatchback. At the folksy grocery store that same ‘sport utility’ car is too Euro to properly rock an ‘eggcentric’ bumper sticker. But, I shampoo chickens! Surely eggcentric is something I can attach my boosters to now. Harumpfh. No? My high heels are inappropriate and rendered obsolete by my age and by point of fact that all occasions worth dressing up for are held at the Mason's Moose International lodge. My churchgoing is too parochial for millennial Mom talk and my yoga is too wooey for the gym. After raising a tribe of goats and harvesting like ten thousand eggs, I should be authentic at home here in the rurals, but I still think of myself as the crust and not the cheese when I’m out and about amongst the locals. At home, however, at least in the barnyard, I'm the matriarch of the domestics. I am in love on the farm.

We all love to love. Isn’t that the truth! Maybe the everybody of now has a memory on pause. Hey, just like me! My way in, to get to authenticity and find my way with the everybody of it all, I need to be in love. Around the animals that is an easy way to be. With a little farmette, like mine, at the drop of a hat someone is going to do something adorable or shameful, guaranteed. It’s like this with dogs and cats and probably ferrets, geckos and on and on for indoor pets too, but because they are co-habitating animals you can bet that no matter the offense we will find ourselves in love with them. Even after breaking through the bungee corded gate and decimating ALL of the vegetable garden, we will still mourn for the beloved goat who met with an accident. JK. In love, a few days is the only token needed to be forgiven for wiping out an entire season of sustenance.

For Honey or any of the chickens it seems simple enough for them to not aspire in anyway, they are good at being chickens which makes loving them an act of aspiration. You do you - cockadoodledoo! It’s just so easy to be when your brain is the size of a pea. At about 2pounds, Honey was just a slip of gal but she left a heavy mark on our family. She contributed a richness to our tapestry and timeline that was so much bigger than her own. I thank her. I loved her for being a child bride for our entertainment.

I owe feeling at home to loving all our poultry: Honey, Shake, Bake, Snowflake, Kisses, Moonlight, Millie, Vanilli, Coke, Pepsi, Oreo, Viceroy, Hazel, Bigwig 1, Bigwig 2, Mary J., Q, Princess Kate, Fosso, Boba, Ginsbird, Big Red, Little Red Hen, Pianissimo, Hawk, Opel, Sirocco, Fone, The General, Capi di Capo and Hazel (aka Gunfeuinerri loved the most deeply of all). We are chicken people.

I love my family. I love to work. I love animals. I love my neighbors as myself. Wait. Do I though? Good question. What’s wrong with the neighbors? Maybe I should meditate on that one while I’m out mucking the barn, armed with a shovel and some real horse shit to ease me out of my head and into some good disappearing. Plus all the manual labor is good for making Madonna arms.

My home is surrounded by chickens who think that grubs grow under everything man made. Our girls are easy to love even when they are destroying things. That’s a good bumper sticker. But, just like the goats, they can turn on a dime and cute meet you in your tracks. So, watch where you step and visit often. We have shared this land with cows, rabbits, horses, dogs, cats and some fish and lots of birds, foreign and domestic. I work for all of them. And, they are all, even if not in all-ways, loved. What’s so exclusive in the anamalia kingdom about the homosapien brand of ‘everybody’ that makes loving other people synonymous with aspiration or downright suffering?

My neighborhood consists exclusively of cows and the people who care for them. To the south they are highland longhorns (I think), to the north, black angus. The east boundary is the dairy, the holsteins, jerseys and brown swiss. Their people are farmers, immigrants, electricians, truck drivers and widows. I hope that there is love happening on these parcels of varying shape and size. I sense there is suffering. Voices and gunshots carry on these westerly winds. To the high west my neighbors are hippies, a firefighter, a factory line operator, a police captain, a carpenter, a medical student, a horse trainer, a guitar maker, a retired auto mechanic and local sea scout leader, a piano teacher, a bicycle entrepreneur and a nurse. The nurse doesn’t like me because my dog has unapologetically eaten her cat food, maybe more than once.

The southern neighbors are 15+ years my senior (I hope). They hold sweat lodge ceremonies in teepees and invite many, many people who chant and drink medicine that allows them to hold the drumbeat for roughly 9 hours (who’s counting?) all-night-long and I assume, they meditate. Our chickens like to wander near the teepee spot, so do the neighbor’s horses who routinely escape, a bevy of wild animals like turkeys, foxes, badgers, skunk and deer. My dogs like to sniff around there and I always see a cat or a raptor perched near the little clearing just fixated on that singular flattened circle of grass. It’s a sacred circle. The animals obviously commune with a vibration there that my nosy neighbor third eye cannot see. The woman who conducts the sessions is the sage of the teepee and she has a waterfall of silver hair down that flows down to the backs of her knees. She is replete with turquoise and somatic wisdom. One day she gently asked me if I could please kindly be a good neighbor and execute the Viceroy. It seems he had wandered down from his routine visit to the sacred spot and assaulted her leg with his spur there on her own front porch. Holy shitake. A righteous request from the feminist next door. What choice did I have? I strapped myself to a rocket of denial and asked my husband to do it. First though, I took the Viceroy swaddled in a towel, chicken burrito style, to meet his accuser. As I stood in apology on the threshold of my new feminist training ground, face to face with her, Viceroy seemed to telepathically stir a silent song from the sacred spot not 100 feet away. At the precipice of good bye, we had all three locked third eyes and in that soulful moment, an acknowledgement passed between us. A communal knowing of defeat. A love soaked recognition of the pitiless unfairness of life. I do thank her for the experience of expanding my notion of love. I’m grateful to have brushed against something so feminist and narrow as “love thy neighbor”.

I made the acquaintances of each of my other neighbors with the exception of the bike guy, and he’s the only one who is an entrepreneur, like me. Funny how that works. After roadside chats, I venture to guess not a one of them would say they love me. Nor can I say how I would include them in my prayers exactly if I were to actually start behaving like a real neighbor myself. As we drove the Viceroy in secret out to the same much larger farm who shelter unwanted or otherwise redundant males I marinated in the truth of the moment. I had to lie to our daughter. I had done it before when we shipped Millie and Vanilli, two other cute little Roosters who got me in trouble to the same farm. On the drive my husband and I discussed our own pecking order and began a very necessary beginning to a creating our own memory textile that we made together, on our own loom, that we built with our own hands. It’s similar to the story everybody is having with everybody RN on trust, terrorism and tyranny and whether or not there’s still common cause to love thy neighbor. I have a feeling that some of my neighbors might meditate on this exact kind of thing, especially the one who flies the Don't Tread on Me flag and of course, the hippies. In fact, I know the hippies do. They do it in the buff outside in the moonlight. On that sacred spot. I’m pretty sure everyone knows that dance move. Girl, you know it's true.