the good, the sad, and the musty
A selection of story snippets from our early April days.
NOT JUST ANOTHER BIRTHDAY
I'm a birthday person. You know, the annoying kind: the celebrate-another-pending-year-of-amazing-possibilities-shove-a-cupcake-in-your-mouth-tap-a-keg-of-sunshine-and-rainbows-oh-and-have-an-extra-present kind of birthday person. I probably shouldn't be. I've had more than my share of traumas and tragedies that have occurred on or very near to my own birthday, but I am what I am. I blame--or, rather, credit--my mother. I do cut the bubbly enthusiasm short of singing though. It seems to me despicably unkind to wish a person a happy birthday then proceed to pulverize the happy with my particular brand of auditory assault. There aren't enough cupcakes in the world to recover from that.
Dennie is...well, less of a birthday person. She's not the grumpy misery some can be about marking the passage of another year, but she does lean more toward the despairing I'm-getting-old camp than the optimistic to-what-awesome-places-will-this-past year's-experiences-lead-me-in-the-coming-twelve-months? camp. Getting her excited about her own birthday is like getting a child to choose Brussels sprouts over M&Ms. For whatever weight it might carry, I have, in past years, declared the occasion a national holiday, even an international holiday. If you didn't receive the memo or spy the message I had blazoned over the totality of the recent eclipse, Dennie’s birthday has now been elevated to an intergalactic holiday. That's big. Though I'm not sure the declaration instilled in her a newfound love for birthdays.
Nonetheless, I did convince her to arrange for the day off. Intermittent rain and sleet kept us homebound, though that was probably for the best after a physically and emotionally draining week. Sometimes stillness of both mind and body is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves. The sorrow of losing Freida hadn't left us, but we tried to make the most of a relaxing day at home--a day of presents, conversation, one racing puppy, and the transformation of old found wonders into newly displayed treasures. We capped off the evening with a lively musical romp through Disney's 2023 animated fantasy feature.
What's a birthday, after all, without a heartfelt Wish?
SIX MONTHS
It was a Saturday morning when I showed Dennie various chicken activity centers I'd found online. A structure like that would provide Freida Lay exercise, entertainment, and extra roosting places while preventing boredom. We considered the features--ladders, bridges, roosts, swings--and talked about how we would build a similar playground, adapting it to our space and the needs of only a single hen. Our lovely lady would adore it, and we'd definitely be adding in a colorful xylophone for her to peck at and play.
The following day, on Easter Sunday, we arrived home from the harbor in the late afternoon. I exited our vehicle only to find Freida once again running toward me with that same kind of enthusiasm my dogs have shown whenever I've come home from anyplace they couldn't travel. She loved us. Whenever we went out for a while, she obviously missed us. And any time Dennie, Maisie, or I stepped outside and Freida was there on the deck or in the yard, she didn't cluck or break into her conversational bud-ups that she used to make when she'd first claimed us as her family. Instead, these past couple months, in our presence she cooed and trilled affectionately as a mother hen to her chicks. We were her flock. She was indisputably part of our pack.
That Sunday was the last time I ever saw Freida. Dennie went out to feed her Monday morning. By then, Freida would often come when called, and--to the query, "Are you hungry?"--she booked it across the lawn like a waddling two-legged racehorse. The way she sped to her family for food or simply to say hello never failed to amuse. What a sight she was! Freida could fly to the top of and over our six foot fence, and she frequently did. But every evening, after foraging across the front lawn, she didn't ascend to her preferred perch. Instead, she waited. Seated comfortably upon the trunk of our car, Freida bided her time until Dennie came outside to bid her goodnight. One smitten chicken farmer opened the gate. One pampered chicken faithfully followed. Dennie offered our hen a snack, which was gratefully consumed. Only then, after this nightly ritual, would our dear feathered one tuck herself in for the night upon her favorite roost. On Monday, April 1st, however, Freida never came home.
Ten days have passed since we'd last heard those familiar trills, the telltale sounds of scratching in the soil, since we'd last collected an egg or observed the curiously endearing behaviors and mannerisms of our hen. Chickens are not prone to running away, especially when they're well cared for and happy. Freida was both. They also possess innate homing skills, meaning they are unlikely to become lost. Predators are the greatest danger--human and animal alike--but we cannot allow our minds to go to the dark places of Freida's possible fates.
For over a week I've watched Maisie stare out the side window where she most often observed her little sister. At first, she'd stay on alert for hours, then she'd slump into her living room bed with a despondent sigh. She understands Freida is gone, yet still she checks from time to time, curling into a heap of beagle blues when her chicken friend cannot be found. Dennie and I have been similarly afflicted. Despite the evidence, as if on autopilot, morning, afternoon, and evening, we peer out each window we pass, hearts heavy, hoping against reason to catch a glimpse of those lustrous orange and white feathers. Every day that hope flutters farther and farther away. Every day we watch for her all the same. While it isn't impossible Freida might saunter back days or weeks from now, following untold adventures, we also know it isn't likely. The acceptance of that fact has been gradual. The grief of that knowledge is very real. Getting to know a chicken the way we've come to know Freida, to bond with her the way we all did (Maisie included)--it alters your entire view of avian companions. She was friendly and loyal and effectively, comically communicative. She was a character and a part of this family in every sense. She chose us. She loved us. She missed us when we were away.
Though we never determined where she’d come from or why she’d made our yard her home, for six months, we welcomed her. We loved her. And we will miss her with every beat of our hearts, through every passing day.
THE TIME CAPSULES
There is a project in our home I've wanted to tackle for the last four years. Allow me to rephrase that: there is a project in our home I've wanted to see completed for the last four years, despite the horrors of actually having to take part in its execution. It's a fine distinction but an important one.
Imagine you've landed a key role in a musical adaptation of Mr. Ed. Exciting, right? (Presuming you love theatre, old sitcoms, and harbor a lifelong dream of portraying a horse's ass.) But then, during the first dress rehearsal, it finally dawns on you that you'll be cantering around the stage for two hours every night, painfully doubled over at a ninety-degree angle while draped in a lead-lined forty-pound costume of an equine posterior. The romance of your spotlight ambition instantly dies. Why couldn't you have been cast as Wilbur or Carol, Roger...or even an ill-fated apple?
This project was kind of like that, only without the delusions of glamour--assuming, of course, that starring as a mammal's derrière can, in any social circle, be considered glamorous. I knew exactly what I was getting into. Day after day I, then we, crept around under the stairs bent at ninety-degree angles while backing out of the confined space clutching mercilessly heavy boxes to our folded-over middles, only to contort vertebrae and muscle again and again to crawl back into the dank, dark hole of under-stair storage to excavate some more. There were moments when many phases of the sun had come and gone while we'd been submerged in darkness, and restoring our spines to a fully upright position felt like nothing more than the most preposterous of pipe dreams. All the while, one certain fate awaited us: we'd have to do it all a second time, only in reverse, hauling, shoving, stacking weighty loads back into the cramped space, maneuvering every inch of the journey folded at a ninety-degree angle. Also, for the entire duration of this four-day ordeal, there was barely enough floor exposed downstairs to navigate our way from one room to the next, and every surface--counters, tables, chairs, and my desk--were heaped with all manner of miscellany extricated from those cardboard cartons of muscular misery and spinal suffering.
To see our home in such a state: oh, the clutter! Oh, the humanity!
The nightmares. They still come.
Why in the memory of precocious prattling ponies would anyone do such a thing? Insanity comes to mind and, while I feel certain that wasn't it, Dennie would probably disagree. There were, in fact, two reasons to undertake this endeavor. There were also two reasons that after years of procrastination, this was the time for such an undertaking. If and when it was to be done, it had to be before late spring and summer temperatures made the task unbearable, if not also dangerous, and the present month is when I believed we were both in urgent need of a major distraction--something, anything that would draw our searching eyes, our desperate hearts, away from the windows. (What could be further from window-gazing than spelunking through the narrowing, sloped abyss at the back of the closet?) The essential purpose of it all, however, that was completely sound.
With the region's high humidity, mold is always a risk, particularly in jam-packed closed-off spaces like the closet that extends under the stairs. We'd lost a number of items stashed there many years ago, some of great sentimental value, and, despite precautions taken since that massive clean-up, mold remained a concern as long as susceptible items were stored in efficiently absorbent cardboard boxes. For years, we've been meaning to also add desiccant packets to those containers and transfer as many items as we could into plastic storage totes instead. I was determined not to lose anything else to the ravages of dampness.
Over four days every box was opened, every item inspected, considered, repacked, discarded, or added to the donation bag. Not everything found its way back into the closet, but most things that did re-entered their old stomping grounds better protected and better labeled too. Much of this project was exactly the kind of unpleasant, labor-intensive chore we'd dreaded, but not all of it. Aside from the satisfaction of a job well done--and done for good reason--Dennie and I both encountered instances of unexpected joy.
Every now and then another box revealed itself to be a time capsule in disguise. We relived schooldays and her dad working his magic on handcrafted wooden toys. We revisited lasting labors of love that had come from both my mom and her parents. We reacquainted ourselves with old friends and past careers. We rescued lost art, lost photo frames, even a lost tambourine and brought them back into the light--found, displayed, and functional once more. And we gaped at a bundle of sartorial sweetness, pondering aloud how it could be possible that Dennie’s son had ever been so small.
After countless brutal-yet-admirable efforts to repurpose our backbones into origami, the closet has been restored to order, better order than it ever had been. (The same cannot be said for our vertebrae.) And years or decades into the future, when, for whatever reason, we plunge into the under-stairs depths once more, perhaps we'll open that first box--the one cunningly masquerading as a time capsule--only to discover a dire warning scrawled with my own blood in my own fatigued arthritic hand: Last chance. Turn back now. She who voluntarily proceeds will be forever cast...a horse's ass.