I began this post prior to the elections. When it seemed as if something wonderful is about to happen might come true. And it did. Just not for me.

In late October 2024, our 13 hens were in full molt, a.k.a. naked of feathers, and no more eggs on the horizon until the skies begin to brighten in the spring. Which I had in mind when I considered the following…

About a year ago, we started discussing, Carl and I, the long-term reality of Darwin’s View, ten, fifteen years from now. That time will be here before we know it, assuming we live so long. And the question is, will we continue to live at Darwin’s View?

I read a book about Joseph Campbell mythic structures and Carl Jung archetypes. Totally up my alley. For better or worse, ideas and possibilities are careening and exploding in my brain.

Sixty-one. That’s how many chickens we’ve tended to and only 13 heartbeats currently beating. Since I last wrote, we have lost three more hens. Meantime, in mid-August, a crow with a broken wing was hopping about along the driveway.

Carl’s phone—its applications run the entire house—is out of order. We went kayaking the other day. A perfect day with just enough breeze to keep off the deer flies. As we were returning, I paddled ahead, leaving Carl and Beth behind. I heard Beth say, “Be careful Carl. The kayak is tipping.”

Of course, chickens. Another hen got an eye thing going on. Here is Barnie, our Barnvelder. A sweet girl although she is really good at dodging humans who are flinging themselves about the chicken yard, trying to catch a hen with an eye infection. Between Barnie and the Broody French Morans, I get a lot of Hairy Eyeballs (some of which are swollen) when I come out to the hen yard.

Thanks to Carl, the pool is magnificent. Clear. Tadpoles happily swimming. One worry about the pool: I heard tell of someone who got a flesh-eating bacteria that landed her in the hospital. How did she get it? Rumor has it by swimming in a lake with an open wound.

Snowball had an eye infection and there are a lot of chickens in need of a bath out there. The turkeys I see with my very own eyes, flirting and dancing and buffing up their wings. But for all those others tweeting and fluttering? Here is a list of birds that I hear in the mornings when I go out to jump into the pool.

Speaking of writer’s block, it doesn’t exist! I read Sarah Rhul’s essay “Writer’s Block” and apparently it’s not real. As she said, it’s more like “the studious avoidance of writing.” She compares it to “exercise block,” which I have also developed. She gives a number of reasons for avoidance, all of which gave me pause.

Bujo. It sounds like a kind of jewel. Give it a Romance language accent, it’s rather elegant, mysterious. In fact, it stands for “bullet journal.” It began March 13th, an obsessive search to replace my datebook, which hadn’t been Golidlocks-just-right anyway.

As I reached into the oven to check on the phyllo dish that was baking, I heard a noise and looked over to the door where…a baby bear was sniffing!

A dead hen. A tree fallen on the driveway. Cats with diarrhea. I thought I had it together. Carl had made it alive up to Saddleback skiing in Maine, but the snow storm here had turned to rain and left the trees all around Darwin’s View—and the solar panels—covered with ice. As the sun rose, everything around me twinkled.

A few days ago, on a Saturday morning in the midst of a storm, I went out to tidy the chicken coop. I noted that Rosie was not well. She huddled, hardly lifted her head, and her wings were drooped.

My begonia, that I got from my mother’s mother or was it my mother’s cousin? In any case, it is quite suddenly ill. To the point that I think she won’t survive…

It has been pointed out to me that I spend more on my email provider than I need to. That it would be easy to switch to a different provider and way more cost effective. Thus, last week, I debated whether to switch. I mention this because it was during my debate about what company to switch to that I remembered the reason I originally went with GreenGeeks.

We went to Firelight Theater’s reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play Aria da Capo. She wrote it in 1919 and one of the most impressive aspects of Aria da Capo? It is timeless. Written over a century ago, yet it is entirely applicable to our current reality.

Last week was on the windy side here at Darwin’s View, with 35 mph winds buffeting the house on a fairly consistent basis. Our large garbage can kept flinging itself out from its position against the tool shed. Having broken free, it would skid down the driveway as if it were late for an appointment.