Our Americana hen, Hamish, died today. She was 7 years old on June June 19th. We've lost several others in the last month, but her passing seems like the end of a family era. She laid gorgeous big bluish-greenish eggs....was still laying up until about a month ago, when they all stopped laying. J buried her in the Fenced Garden saying that the garden was as much hers as ours. She spent many happy hours in there with the others, scratching for bugs and bits. Hard to believes she's gone....so robust and smart we figured she'd be the last hen standing out of their flock.
The hens started out as something our daughter wanted to do in her senior year in high school...actually she wanted to rescue a bunch of chicks that were hatched at school ,( in one of those misguided class projects ), but I said, "no"...let's order some from a hatchery ( ugh...that was before I became vegan ! ), and before we knew it, there we were, in love with the little peeps that arrived via the post office, in a cardboard box. I think we always gave them good care...lots of room to run about and explore, good food, fresh water, and we even built a nice hen house which has become a focal point of our yard.
When our daughter went off to college, the hens needed me to take care of them and I loved the rhythm they brought to my day. The girls would be crowding the door to be the first out to start the day's bug hunt. Just before dusk they would amble back in to the house and arrange themselves on the roost, fussing about who would sleep where. Some of the smaller ones worked their bodies up under the wings of the two big Cochins, some would roost apart from the others, all murmuring ancient chicken songs to themselves and each other. Rain they hated. Falling snow was intriguing, but accumulated snow was a problem. One year snow drifted 3 feet deep in the hen yard. I shoveled high-walled alleys so they could get outside and stretch their legs and watched them parade single-file down the blue corridors.
Only three hens left. Who will I bake giant pans cornbread for in the bleak dark days of Winter ?
