I have an egg farm in my backyard. There, I said it. Four mature hens, and four hopefuls. I say hopefuls because I only need a total of 6 laying hens, so two of the pullets aren’t going to make the cut. Now I could make a joke here about chicken and dumplings being on the menu for those two, but in my chicken world, there’s no need to be butchering a perfectly good egg layer. As Captain Barbossa said, “waste not..” I will simply take these two extras to the local weekly “chicken trade”, (this actually exists, you can’t make this up) and unload these two for enough cash to turn into another 40 pound bag of laying mash, which for the unfamiliar is chicken food for hens laying eggs. I’ve never read the contents of this bag of magic pellets to see what separates it from any other chicken food, just what exactly the contents are that promote egg laying. As long as these four hens are dropping 2-4 eggs a day, I don’t care if its ground unicorn. I’m only in this for the eggs.
This morning I was faced with a dilemma. Something in my hen’s small universe has slowed egg production in the past three days, and I opened the egg carton this morning to find only two large brown homegrown eggs staring back at me. This isn’t normal, we normally don’t go below 8-10 eggs in the inventory. Normally not a big deal, but I really wanted to cook Jeannie and Hannah a good breakfast this Saturday morning. And I cook eggs like I used to drink. If I can’t crack open 6 of these, why bother.
So I got the biscuits in the oven, got the bacon started, and sat in the living room with Hannah to watch part of another episode of Monk, while I pondered my egg shortage. When I got up to go turn the bacon I went ahead and cracked my two remaining eggs into a mixing bowl, poured in a little milk and stirred in some shredded mozzarella cheese, salt and pepper.
Being generally XL sized eggs, this filled the mixing cup better than I had thought it might, and I felt a bit better, but I still had this nagging thought that if I could just get one more egg in there…
Then it hit me. It’s Saturday, we had slept in a bit. There was a possibility that one of the hens may have already dropped an egg by now. Boom, problem solved. I slid on my shoes, quick stepped it out to the hen pen, and walked around to the nest door to claim my prize. I should have counted the hens visible as I walked around the pen. But I was on a mission. I opened the door, and hen #4 looked over her wing at me from the nest as if to say, “what? I’m busy here!” Snap! No chance of that third egg before the scrambles hit the skillet. And if I bother the girls too much, I get even fewer eggs.
So back to the kitchen, poured the scrambles into the sizzling skillet, pulled the biscuits out of the oven, plated the bacon, and called my ladies down for breakfast, hoping they would not notice the glaring shortage of scrambled eggs I was about to drop into a serving bowl. I fussed over the biscuits and bacon to draw attention away from the eggs. But as they made their plates, and scooped out some eggs to go with the biscuits and bacon and butter and jelly, no one seemed to notice what was so glaring to me. We had a good meal, I didn’t have to do dishes, and here I sit writing this story.
I’m grateful for what I have. I love my wife, I love my children. Life is good here, in spite of what life throws at us. There have been some things happen in the past three weeks that have been tough to get through, but coming out of the other end of them, I’m realizing that these events are as serious as I let them be. My faith in God, as variable as it seems sometimes, has yet again stabilized my outlook and ability to play catcher to what life throws across the plate at me.
And if those hens don’t increase egg production by at least 25% over the next 2 weeks, well, I guess we’ll eat fewer eggs..
Have a great weekend, I’m going to.
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