Keeping it on the DL

A metro neighborhood paper unexpectedly wrote a story about our place which was published Labor Day weekend.  Hmmm.. Just when the girls disappeared.  We got a phone message last week from a woman who was interested in learning more about our "urban farm" because she'd read the article.
B. and I have always sparred a bit about calling our place a farm.  He does so easily and without shame.  To me, it's disrespectful of real farmers.  We do have a large garden, a small orchard, and well... we used to have three chickens.

I remember Dad once told me you have to have 14 acres to qualify as a farm in the U.S.census.  I don't know if that is still true or not. The IRS says you need to sell something to deduct farmer things, so not a farm by those standards.  Our friend Galen said they used to have 3000 chickens (or some number larger than three).  That is agriculture--or maybe it will be again, now that mega chicken agriculture is getting busted.  It was reported that the two Iowa operations involved in the salmonella recall housed a combined 7.7 million caged hens.  Does that qualify as a farm in the U.S. census?

Small is beautiful.

The girls have vanished

All of a sudden today we realized the chickens were gone.  Vanished.  Last night B. closed the cage, as the ladies always put themselves to bed about dark. This morning no girls waiting to get out.  No poop under the perch.  No eggs to collect.  No chickens.  Only yesterday people had dropped by and Checkers, Rosie, and Lacey were hanging around begging for scraps from our visitors (not cool).  Maybe they disappeared because I complained about their poor manners.  

It is as improbable to picture someone walking into the yard and picking them up, as it is to imagine that they somehow breached homeland security and waddled up the street.  Advance Auto Parts put a flier up.  The neighbor to the east said he had seen foxes going over the fence between our yards.  He said at his house in Santa Fe foxes came in the night to eat apples.  Another friend said a lot of cats were being killed by foxes in her neighborhood right now.  Yet, nowhere was there a sign of feathers or trauma of any kind.

I think it's some kind of object lesson about the impermanence of things, even livestock, even pets, even my own very life itself.  I'm reading a novel right now about the internment of citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.  Poof.  At first people burned anything connecting them to Japan, that might arouse suspicion.  They found places to store things, imagining they might return soon.  In reality they ended up imprisoned, and in most cases lost all their possessions.  In reality land speculators snatched up vacant properties formerly occupied by evacuees. 

Yesterday there were chickens.  Today we don't know where they went.  Nothing lasts forever.  To quote the Nebbishes, "You work, you save, you put a little bit aside.  You build yourself a cozy place.  The minute you relax and try to enjoy it, Bang! The cardboard flies off the window!!"

Live for today.  Enjoy the time you have.  Even enjoy the stuff you have.  It can't last all that long, really.

 (The good news is maybe the yippy chihuahuas next door will not last forever either.)