Pretty Chooks

Each morning I call out to my four Silver Lace Wyandottes, "Here, (or Hear...listener's choice), Chookie-chook-chook-chook." Every morning for months.

I got these four chickens in June or so.  I ordered "older" chicks (or, as I call them, chooks).  Not day-old little chicks, but some with a few weeks of life to them, so that I could forego the month or months of babying the baby chicks.  Cute though they be, baby chicks are smelly and labor-intensive.  Older chooks, ugly though they be, have a greater viability rate.

All I ask of this coexistence between my feeding/housing them, and their existence on our property, is that they provide us with a daily egg,  That's all I ask.

Hooray!  Yesterday was a one-egg morning.  Today?  A stellar two-egg morning!  By George, I think they've got it!  

Yes: Apparently, we have become the Clampetts.

A Big Ol' Moon

Last week I was describing on the phone to that Spouse o' Mine something I had seen out here in the middle of nowhere in rural Kansas.  "They were putting in a big ol' tank."  "A big ol' tank?!"  And that's how he, Aussie folk, mocked my Okie vernacular: big ol'.  And the "ol' " is not pronounced as you might hear someone from the East or West Coast reading it from a book - it's not "big ol" with the tip of the tongue pronouncing the "L" (as in "Olaf").  The "l" is pronounced, starting in the back of the tongue and meandering towards the tongue tip, but it stops somewhere along the way, as only an Okie can do it.

Big ol'

Whole slew

Lotsa

Rilly big/little  (rhymes with "hilly")

And so it goes..

Anyway - here is my addition to what no doubt is a whole slew of rilly big pictures of a big ol' moonrise tonight:  my tripod was my shoulder leaning against a fence post out in the pasture.

A Celebration of Life, in the Present:

Last week I received an invitation to celebrate an acquaintance and neighbor's 91st birthday.  She is an acquaintance of nearly fifteen years, and a neighbor...some seven miles away.  (That's how it works in rural Kansas.)

It was a morning coffee today with something like ten women attending. Ten women of three generations -PLUS two children of another generation - so...four generations celebrating coffee and coconut creme cake with this amazing woman, around her rural kitchen table with which most of us are so comfortably acquainted.

We women all know each other by close or distant social occasions; whatever the definition, we were all so comfortable in our meeting this morning, it was a true joy.  (We even sang Happy Birthday in  two-part harmony.)

True joy, also, by celebrating this wonderful neighbor's life thus far.  How fun to enjoy the sharing of parts of her life's daily diary, started in 1942.  A daily diary!  Her daughter read spits and spots of it to us, and I was transfixed.  We all had so much fun revisiting our own family heritage/history by her written words.

I left this morning's coffee with a song in my heart.  How nice to be able to celebrate a life well-led, and especially, a life that truly had hardships which she has shared both in her diaries, and to some of us {me} in person.

And so?  There are so many folks out there with great stories to hear and to share.  I am always so uplifted when I visit this neighbor and her family.  Her grace and humor and intelligence.

I guess I would close this by saying "Thanks be to God."