There’s a knock at the door. Guess who?
Responsibility.
My responsibilities are a too-tight turtleneck. I can’t catch a break, their slow squeeze tugging at the collar.
I gear up, revving my system as the tires spin, waiting to unleash like a rocket to the sky.
But it’s Saturday! To dos on the calendar are as cloudless as a desert summer sky.
Yet the darts get thrown anyway. Stick to the board. Each one an added weight, each one coming with the circus price of yet another thing to do.
And then I do it.
The rabbits’ kiddie pool, with its urine- and poop-covered dirt, was starting to smell. My body’s recoil needed somewhere to go. Five minutes of turning the soil, pulling up dead grass, and topping it off with a fresh layer of alfalfa.
Five minutes, and I could rest easy.
Until the next thing.
Can I stay the course with a loungey weekend while spending an hour at Tractor Supply?
Unfortunately, one of the eight chickens we bought yesterday died, and customer service said I have forty days to get another one if I have the receipt.
Which I don’t.
The alternative is digging up the buried chick, and ain’t nobody wanting to do—or see—that. So I’ll take my chances without a paper trail and hope I talk to someone with a little reason.
I throw two handfuls of unshelled peanuts into the yard once or twice a day. Two or three crows are where I started, but for the past week I’ve had a murder of seven or eight strutting and sauntering around the property.
Similar to the fondness at seeing our regular FedEx driver or USPS mail carrier, I get that same sense of “Welcome” whenever they stop by.
I recently learned that putting up a tall perch can encourage crows to hang around, so I need to research it more. With the recent arrival of eight chickens, it’d be pretty cool if I could convince Mother Nature to help protect them.
As you may or may not know, crows are excellent at driving off predators like hawks and eagles. Once one starts that unmistakable caw—the one that alerts the others—they come in droves.
And man, is it ever cool.
Even cooler would be finding a way to channel that energy around our flock.
The quarterfinal of the World Cup is going on now. Will Messi do it yet again? We shall see…
Love, Jaclynn