At the Light of Dawn
Anyone that knows me is aware I prefer practicality and efficiencies, but in that same breath, striving for simplicity reigns supreme. Because of that, even after owning chickens for more than half a decade now, we don't have an automatic chicken door. As long as a scrap piece of wood is able to make a fine enough door, and we are able bodied enough to regularly get to the coop, you won't find me reaching for my wallet. That means every evening, after facilitating teeth brushing and story reading for the rugrats, Tom schleps into the coop with flashlight in hand and locks up the girls (and Richard, our Rouen drake) and I go out each morning as rays of sun just start to kiss the sky.
On weekends, I used to sneak downstairs quietly, tend to my bird chores, and try to tip toe back to my room, taking all precautions to not wake up the aforementioned kiddos. Mama could always use just a little more shut eye on a Saturday morning you know. The day came, however, that the boy, Tommy, heard my incoming footsteps on my way to let the girls out, and of course he had to accompany me. Since then, his scurrying feet precede mine most mornings, as if his excitement zaps through his body at the first flicker of his waking eyes. “We have to let the birds out together,” he would implore, “you do the ducks, I do the chickens.” In the rare event he doesn't hear me and is lost in slumber, his adamant expectation is that I wake him to join me. If I don't, an explosive toddler tantrum ensues.
So, for the past few weeks at least, morning chicken chores, as we call them, have become a mother son effort. We sit on the back step in our jammies and put on our rain boots sans socks, a look that's much cuter on him than me. “We are farmers,” he says as we walk towards the coop, “we need to do farm things.” We release the birds and Tommy tries to pet each one as they come through the small door. He has about a fifty percent success rate.
We then grab them some food, and fill waterers if needed. The boy is helpful with both, but with the feed, he's been doing it entirely on his own. Opening the galvanized can, scooping, dumping, even adding amendments needed for the ducks. I can't help but smile as he goes through the motions, especially at only three and a half years old. Sometimes I help him carry the food bowl, and sometimes he does it on his own, but he always puts it down, again going for some pets as the birds dive in.
What I first thought of as a slow down, an inconvenience, to have him help me when I just wanted him to keep sleeping so I could return to my covers post task, has become one of my favorite daily encounters. The time shared warms my soul just as the sun warms the world around us. These moments are one of the many reasons for our upcoming move, which seems so close yet far away (more to come on that). We are all yearning for these experiences to become more than a blip within our days, but to become our way of life. Afterall, “We are farmers. We need to do farm things.”
