Nomad

Two clutches of chicks. Two different hens. These two troops gather less than ten feet from each other. I wonder whether this is unusual, to see two separate broods in such close proximity. I would like to feed them, but have already taken the Eggo waffles from the freezer next door. The only thing I might have is uncooked rice.

Those little babies, they chirp when mother hen hops over what was once the foundation of a shed, from the concrete to the grass, expecting her babies to follow. The other set of chicks have grown older. They can follow mom over the wall.

I wonder about the ones that survive. I wonder how they split off from one another. How is it decided who stays together? If the set of six and the set of seven all survive, it is unlikely that I will see these two sets together a year from now. They go elsewhere. They join other groups. They break free.

The one that Angie calls Freckles often rolls around by herself in the back space where the satsumas grow.

I sometimes drive down the block and see chickens I think to be the offspring of chickens I knew long ago. I see some of them with speckled spots, markings of the Rhode Island Reds that came from Olivia and Amber Dawn. I see multicolored roosters I know once lived in this yard.

I hear the song of planes passing, nail guns shooting nails, tugboats barking for bridges to be opened. I think about what it means to leave. I think about those who stay close.

My brother and sisters all live within fifty miles of my mom. And here, I have been almost a thousand miles away for over twenty years. I wonder why some leave and some stay. I wonder where the eggs of this second batch of chickens sat for 24 days. I wonder what Albania might be like. I wonder what stopped me from writing these blogs for almost two weeks now. 

The simple answer would be that I have been working to finish a book about a journey I took long ago. Perhaps not working on the blogs is a part of this journey. I know that the answer cannot come in a head like examination of why. The answer might become clearer through the actual practice of writing.

It might have been Orwell who said that he wrote to find out what he believes. And yes, I write for this, and I write to try to describe a month without rain, to convey the way leaves crunch when I lean back in this swinging bench. 

I want to know what reaches without drooping even in these days without rain, how eating papaya leaves might taste, how much moringa needs to grow before the poisons of the ground are gone. 

Maybe curiosity dropped the leaf that just fell beside me. Maybe curiosity led the fledglings into a space where they found other fledglings. And maybe in the babies of these chicks there will be an even stronger desire to carry on to another place. 

And maybe, in the crunch of these leaves there comes the life that is needed for the mother hen to dig in her claws and rustle up bugs for her offspring, and maybe, in their witness of this a determination is made in some of them, a willingness to watch and to learn in order to scratch on their own. And maybe, in some of the others, especially those who are younger, there exists the memory of what life felt like inside a shell, of what life felt like when mom sat atop their bodies and kept them warm at night, and in these there is a yearning to create this and an aversion to rising to the size where legs and wings might lift them up and over the wall of concrete.