“Grammy, have you done the chickens?”

This morning greeting still catches me by surprise, coming from the window in the peak of the barn. Forever home to spiders and swallows I’m still not used to its new purpose – home to three grandchildren and their parents.

The voice belongs to the six-year-old who’s taken on chicken chores in a serious way.

“Not yet, Jack,” I answer, reminding him to put on shoes before coming down to help.

Together we walk around back to the henhouse where the birds have already sensed our arrival and are clucking up a storm. First off we open up the chicks’ house, the little building where the half-grown pullets and meat birds live.

For a time, a few weeks ago, this was a daily trauma, as we were losing a chick every day. In an outbreak of viciousness I’ve never seen in a young flock, the meat birds (a specially bred strain that puts on weight in an astonishingly short time) were apparently pecking each other to death.

Jack’s daily duty then was to announce sorrowfully, “another dead chick, Grandma” or “no dead chicks today.” Either way it wasn’t the lesson you’d want for a six-year-old.

If I got there first I’d grab the surprisingly heavy corpse and toss it as far into the woods as possible, getting it out of sight. But every time Jack still wanted to see it, to hunt through the underbrush and examine it for himself.

Half the chicks are pullets, young laying hens of a different, more delicate breeding. Where the meat birds can barely get out of their own way, with oversize breasts and thighs, the Pearl White Leghorns are dainty and quick, able to dart in and out, fly if they want, in other words, normal birds.

We’ve always referred to the meat birds as Franken chickens, a made-to-order, genetically programmed breed that grows, in 8-12 weeks, into the hearty, plump chicken we’re all accustomed to finding wrapped in plastic in the meat section. Efficient, cost-effective, cheap meat. But they have some troubles beyond being clumsy and silly-looking. Some tend to develop bad legs, and can no longer walk at all. We have one right now, and Jack is most solicitous of it, carrying it back into the coop when it starts to rain, seeing that it’s positioned in easy reach between the waterer and the feeder.

Meanwhile, the daily slaughter continued, even as we moved the flock out of the brooder box and into the relative spaciousness of the chick house, thinking that overcrowding was the problem. But it wasn’t enough. Those birds were determinedly doing each other in.

Then the ten-year-old took over. She stationed herself outside the coop and waited patiently until the birds stopped noticing her and went about their normal business. Within minutes she announced, “it’s the little hens that are doing it!” The big, goofy meat birds were being massacred by those sweet little future egg-layers.

We’d had no idea.

We quickly jury-rigged a wall dividing the space in half, separating the two breeds, and the vicious bullying stopped. A few days later we opened the door and let everyone out into the yard together. Between eating bugs and taking dust baths there’s been enough to occupy the perpetrators. Everyone’s settled down to Jack’s relief. His flock is finally behaving itself.

Our favorite moment is watching Fluffbutt, our Brahmin rooster, launch himself from the perch. Fluffbutt arrived in the flock last year as the “free exotic chick” offered by the Murray McMurray hatchery along with a regular order of birds. We spotted him, the exotic one, right off as he was the only chick with feathered legs and feet. He grew into a large, sweet-tempered rooster, and this spring took charge of our flock of a dozen hens when his predecessor, Roger, became nasty. (Roger then went the way of all mean roosters).

Fluffbutt’s been sharing his roost with a newcomer, Rosella, a picked-on hen we took in from a friend’s flock. Seems her own offspring had turned on her and had terrorized her to the point that she never left the coop. Her owners brought her over in the dark one night and released her inside our henhouse, hopeful that our flock would accept her. By the next morning she was already clinging close to Fluffbutt, probably figuring that’s where the power lay in this new arrangement.

If you’ve never kept chickens chances are you didn’t realize how like us they can be.

So every morning after Jack or I open the door to the yard and all the hens rush out clucking madly, trying to be first at the pile of kitchen scraps we’ve dumped in their pan, Fluffbutt is carefully lining up his trajectory from perch to door. The first several weeks this spring he’d invariably crash into the wall or door frame, misjudging the distance. Like a giant C130 Transport plane with a too-short runway he never had enough room. But in recent weeks he seems to have it figured out, and now when he takes off it’s a nice, straight shot off the perch and right out the door. Jack and I cheer every time.

With his two siblings, or by himself if they’re not around, Jack carefully collects eggs without ever cracking any, herds the two flocks into their separate quarters in the evening, the laying birds into their big house and the chicks into theirs, and always latches the various gates and doors behind him.

I can no longer use Wally’s excuse to leave a gathering early: “got to put the chickens in”. Long before dark I know Jack, with or without help, will have them tucked in, safe from foxes and raccoons and fishers.

“So, how’s it going, having your family living upstairs?”

I get some version of this question everywhere I go. And I’m sure my son and d-i-l hear a similar query – “so how’s it going living with your mother??” Or even more incredulously – “…..living with your mother-in-law????”

Happily, we’re unanimous in answering: “It’s great!”

Of course, it hasn’t been even a month since they actually moved in, since the door to their upstairs quarters was installed, and we formally became a divided house. We talk to the children about privacy, we try to knock or at least call out “are you home?” before barging in. I installed a door to my bedroom, formerly an office/workroom.

A baby gate spans the top of the old stairway; Fritz still has to be reminded several times a day that he’s a downstairs dog. Even so, the three cats that moved in upstairs do venture down in the middle of the night making for some wild confrontations with him and my cat, Smitten.

Ed and Tracee are determined to empty out their old house this week and get it ready to sell. We’ll be making many trips to Goodwill, the dump and the burn pile behind the garden. We’re all still feeling buried in clutter when we look at what’s left to be done, but one pile at a time it is getting done.

And I won’t be disappointed if Jack’s fascination with chickens doesn’t last. Like so much of childhood, it will live on in his memory, just as I remember picking raspberries with my grandpa, just as Wally always remembered his feeding him donuts and cheese for breakfast.

The knitting/needlework group meets Tuesday, June 26, 4-6 p.m. Bring a project and join this gathering of talented and just-learning fiber workers. Everyone is welcome to come and enjoy this lively social circle. They meet the first, second and fourth Tuesdays of every month. The first one is a special knitting workshop for beginners or anyone needing help with a project.

Librarian Elizabeth Eudy says the Library’s garden, the fenced in garden, is really looking beautiful. Bring your lunch or a book, sit down on one of the benches and enjoy the space. Everyone’s welcome….

Neighborhood Pot Luck
Anyone in Lincolnville, as well as their guests, is invited to the monthly pot luck at Bay Leaf Cottages & Bistro, south of the Beach on Atlantic Highway and just before Viking Lumber. Bay Leaf provides a beverage and meat/beans. Bring a salad, casserole or dessert to share. Plates, cups, etc. provided. BYOB if you wish. The pot luck is held the last Monday of the month through September, 6-8 p.m.

Strawberry Festival on the Horizon

Here are excerpts from a letter written home by 18-year-old Helen Higgins to her mother, Eliza Higgins living on Greenacre Road in Lincolnville. Helen was away from home for the first time, teaching school in Newburgh, Maine where the Higgins’ family had relatives:

“I really believe they think me a foreign species … there’s a Fred down here apiece who wants to get acquainted with our school marm very much. He came along as I came out of the school house one night but sad to say, I dropped my gloves and had to go back. Then he called up to Mr. Bussey’s when I came along but I had to call to Mr. Bussey too and when I came out he had got out of sight.

“I have to work every minute out of school hours it takes so long to do nothing. I don’t get home very early nights, I shall learn more about Algebra this summer than ever I have before, for I have every question put on the board and explain.

“Charlie Mudgett and Georgie Nye are the smallest of my scholars. Charlie is the quickest boy to learn that I ever saw. He never went to school before and he reads in his ‘abcs’ now. One day I tried him to see if he could read in reading and he spelled it out (g-o-gosip.) He persisted in spelling [dog] backward for a while. Georgie is a darling about as big as a pint of cider. Charlie M. went home and told that I kissed him and they plagued him so about kissing the school marm he took off around the corner of the house like mad.

“O, I forgot to tell you that two young men stayed here last night. They were pious and one of them prayed for me very earnestly. I have to keep so much laughs bottled up all the time that they would have to let that out before I could get converted anyway. O, I’m so good. Your daughter Helen”