I live in the country...
it's something that I've wanted to do ever since I was in college.
And my fantasy of living in the country always included raising chickens.
Thirty-seven years later, I sit looking out at our chicken yard and chicken house from the home office of my business, which also houses my internet radio station, and I feel a sense of happiness and satisfaction.
By the way, the chicken house, built by my husband, is no ordinary one...
it's modeled after Martha Stewart's Palais de Poulets and it is quite palatial.
If I look out the other window of my office, I look out onto my neighbor's hayfield.
I like these views.
The country is peaceful and beautiful and when I have the opportunity to work from home, I seem to be the happiest.
I look out at the chickens we've had for over five years and I smile at their antics.
We have babied and spoiled them and they know they are our pets.
They in turn provide us with incredibly delicious fresh eggs.
The chickens like our attention, "talking" back to us when we talk to them.
They follow us around the yard and will "work" alongside us in the garden.
They can move around mounds of dirt with incredible intensity and speed.
Problem is we usually never want those mounds rearranged.
They've eaten plant tops down to the dirt - thereby ending that plant's ambitions of making it to a vegetable - and have dug up an entire crop of shallots that were not yet ready to be dug up.
We finally learned that fencing was our only recourse if we wanted to harvest any produce.
We shake our heads and smile ruefully, but we enjoy them - their destructiveness not withstanding.
Then I look at the new small flock that we started a few months back.
Sadly, we lost three of the six we started with, but the remaining ones are plump, beautifully feathered and lively.
These three have made it to "hen-hood" and have just begun laying eggs, but they seem like adolescents because of their frenetic antics.
For example, all three will suddenly take off at breakneck speed running in unison from under one shrub or tree as if on a mission only to abruptly stop under another and stand and do nothing.
They are definitely attached to us, follow us around, seek our attention, "talk" to us even more than the older flock does and will let us pet them.
In a very short time, they have made it to pet-hood.
It's alongside the older flock that I see the upside and downside of maturation.
The difference in girth is the most prominent - the older chickens look scrawny in comparison to the new fat hens.
Their feathers are not quite as luminous and they don't run with the same wild abandon of the new hens.
That's where the downside ends.
We have yet to incorporate the new flock in with the old.
There is a good reason why we haven't put them in the chicken yard and house that the older chickens and rooster live in (they have temporary separate smaller quarters within the chicken yard).
In "chickendom", they are on the bottom rung of the pecking order.
The older chickens would not be kind to them.
The older chickens don't take any guff from the newer ones and remind them frequently when they are all out in our back yard just who is really in charge.
The older chickens will chase the younger ones away from the food when they decide it is time for them to eat.
They will harass the younger ones away from choice nesting spots in the soft dirt where they take their dirt baths.
Getting older in the world of chickens seems to mean something - growing older accords them status.
Now as a Baby Boomer Woman, I like this arrangement.
Society tries to make women who are beginning to age invisible.
And yes, our culture does place a high premium on youth and tries to place older women lower in "the pecking order".
That's the downside of getting older.
The upside is that once you do reach maturity, you begin to not care so much about what others think.
Others perceptions no longer shape whether we will or won't do something.
It's the process of self-actualization...
one of the tenets of it being that "one is independent of the good opinion of others.
" The other great upside I am seeing is that so many women in their forties, fifties, sixties and beyond are reinventing themselves...
starting a new career, starting to write, starting to paint, starting new businesses, taking old businesses to higher levels of success, and much more.
We don't have to accept society's pecking order; we can create our own status despite the one our culture wants to place on us.
I feel in good company with these women and deeply appreciate their accomplishments as well as my own.
it's something that I've wanted to do ever since I was in college.
And my fantasy of living in the country always included raising chickens.
Thirty-seven years later, I sit looking out at our chicken yard and chicken house from the home office of my business, which also houses my internet radio station, and I feel a sense of happiness and satisfaction.
By the way, the chicken house, built by my husband, is no ordinary one...
it's modeled after Martha Stewart's Palais de Poulets and it is quite palatial.
If I look out the other window of my office, I look out onto my neighbor's hayfield.
I like these views.
The country is peaceful and beautiful and when I have the opportunity to work from home, I seem to be the happiest.
I look out at the chickens we've had for over five years and I smile at their antics.
We have babied and spoiled them and they know they are our pets.
They in turn provide us with incredibly delicious fresh eggs.
The chickens like our attention, "talking" back to us when we talk to them.
They follow us around the yard and will "work" alongside us in the garden.
They can move around mounds of dirt with incredible intensity and speed.
Problem is we usually never want those mounds rearranged.
They've eaten plant tops down to the dirt - thereby ending that plant's ambitions of making it to a vegetable - and have dug up an entire crop of shallots that were not yet ready to be dug up.
We finally learned that fencing was our only recourse if we wanted to harvest any produce.
We shake our heads and smile ruefully, but we enjoy them - their destructiveness not withstanding.
Then I look at the new small flock that we started a few months back.
Sadly, we lost three of the six we started with, but the remaining ones are plump, beautifully feathered and lively.
These three have made it to "hen-hood" and have just begun laying eggs, but they seem like adolescents because of their frenetic antics.
For example, all three will suddenly take off at breakneck speed running in unison from under one shrub or tree as if on a mission only to abruptly stop under another and stand and do nothing.
They are definitely attached to us, follow us around, seek our attention, "talk" to us even more than the older flock does and will let us pet them.
In a very short time, they have made it to pet-hood.
It's alongside the older flock that I see the upside and downside of maturation.
The difference in girth is the most prominent - the older chickens look scrawny in comparison to the new fat hens.
Their feathers are not quite as luminous and they don't run with the same wild abandon of the new hens.
That's where the downside ends.
We have yet to incorporate the new flock in with the old.
There is a good reason why we haven't put them in the chicken yard and house that the older chickens and rooster live in (they have temporary separate smaller quarters within the chicken yard).
In "chickendom", they are on the bottom rung of the pecking order.
The older chickens would not be kind to them.
The older chickens don't take any guff from the newer ones and remind them frequently when they are all out in our back yard just who is really in charge.
The older chickens will chase the younger ones away from the food when they decide it is time for them to eat.
They will harass the younger ones away from choice nesting spots in the soft dirt where they take their dirt baths.
Getting older in the world of chickens seems to mean something - growing older accords them status.
Now as a Baby Boomer Woman, I like this arrangement.
Society tries to make women who are beginning to age invisible.
And yes, our culture does place a high premium on youth and tries to place older women lower in "the pecking order".
That's the downside of getting older.
The upside is that once you do reach maturity, you begin to not care so much about what others think.
Others perceptions no longer shape whether we will or won't do something.
It's the process of self-actualization...
one of the tenets of it being that "one is independent of the good opinion of others.
" The other great upside I am seeing is that so many women in their forties, fifties, sixties and beyond are reinventing themselves...
starting a new career, starting to write, starting to paint, starting new businesses, taking old businesses to higher levels of success, and much more.
We don't have to accept society's pecking order; we can create our own status despite the one our culture wants to place on us.
I feel in good company with these women and deeply appreciate their accomplishments as well as my own.
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