Another Day in the Country©
A friend was telling me the other day, about her adopted granddaughter — a mixed race child — who requested an unusual graduation gift. She asked her parents to find her birthparents so she could meet them. This introduction turned out to be a pleasant event. She was most fortunate, because they don’t always turn out that way.
Subsequently, she decided to move to the community of her birthparents. “I’m going back to my people,” she explained. She wasn’t abandoning her parents. She loved them, kept in touch but “my people” supplied something that had been missing in her life.
I contemplate this phenomenon of genetic imprinting because I have an adopted child and even though she has not been interested in searching for birthparents, I’ve wondered if finding “her people” could supply some grounding connection that has been missing in her life.
This search for one’s family happened in my chicken flock a few weeks ago — I have two colonies of chickens. House #1 contains the oldsters (in chicken years) and House #2 contains the younger generation.
As you may recall, for those who enjoy my chicken stories, this younger set consists of three chicks that we raised. I say “we” because Biddy, my black hen, insisted on setting and I had to hustle to find fertilized eggs because I thought that Clifford, the rooster I had at the time, was probably gay. Clifford was such a sweetie and definitely didn’t devil the hens to death like other roosters, so I just concluded that (thankfully) he was low on testosterone. (Turns out he wasn’t, though.)
Anyhow, Biddy set on this conglomeration of her eggs, neighbors’ eggs, and hatched out three chicks. After a couple of weeks, I let her out of the little brooder house. She stretched her legs, called to her chicks and when they were afraid to come out, she had herself a dust bath and then headed across the street to House #1 where she had always lived. She said, “I’m going back to my people,” clear as day and left the care of her three chicks to me.
Since I didn’t want three chicks growing up alone, I adopted another dozen chicks from Tractor Supply. Eventually, I integrated the 12 with the three and they now make up the second community of chickens.
Now the plot thickens. Of the three chicks hatched here, one was a rooster (that’s Reggie), one was a brownish hen (that’s Brown Betty), and one didn’t get a name because she’s looks like half the hens in the house with Bard Rock patterning on her feathers. Because she didn’t stand out, she didn’t get a name — let that be a lesson!
When the hens started laying, I could tell which eggs came from my homestead girls. The nameless hen, of all things, laid a green egg because she had Aracana blood in her genetics, while Brown Betty’s egg was beige — this in a hen house where all the other girls had either standard white or brown eggs. This green egg was unusual in its coloration because the green was really a khaki-colored green.
Several weeks ago, I stopped finding that one green egg amongst the eggs I gathered in House #2. When this continued, I thought that my green-egg-laying hen had gone on strike. And then strangely a khaki green egg began to appear amongst the blue/green/white/brown eggs from House #1.
“How could this be?” I asked myself. And then I counted the chickens one night and discovered that I had an extra hen in the house. My non-descript black and white hen had come over to be with her mother’s (and her father’s) people.
I wonder if that is what I was doing when I came back to Kansas. Of course it was! Jess and I were returning to Ramona where our parents had been born and raised, where we had aunts and uncles living. Even though we’d lived our lives far away from Kansas, we were coming back, hoping to find people that we resonated with — people who laid green eggs instead of standard white or brown, people who were adventurous, and people, in my Grandma Schubert’s tradition, who planted heaps of flowers and always looked for the good in others.
Most definitely, in the hard times, like when TTT died, my people came from all over to give support and offer comfort. On Memorial Day, our people arrive and we decorate the graves of our connected families. To belong is a blessed gift. Celebrate it, with your people, on another day in the country.