All four cords of wood are stacked neatly outside the kitchen window. (Photo courtesy Doug Wright)
The wind is cold today and it is howling around the corner of the church on the hill, where I have my office. Our trees are at the height of their color and are taking a whipping in the wind. Many leaves have flown far away.
We are continuing our wood stacking of the wonderful firewood we bought from Lance. It is a wonderful mixture of various local hardwoods and it is dry. Hard to find these days. So I am stacking it as close as I can get it to the kitchen door, all four cords of it. Makes a nice sight looking out my kitchen window. I can look up the path, and across the yard and right in front of me is my nice dry wood stacked neatly and straight with all the ends plumb. Pappa taught me to keep the piles plumb because gravity always wins out and sooner or later a leaning pile will fall over. Totally thrilling when it happens in a blizzard and gets covered with snow. Your nice pile.
The oak trees have dropped millions of acorns everywhere. The roads are covered with crushed acorns and look out for the turkeys, which are a menace to traffic. They will continue to eat and stare you down until you honk and of course they will all honk back!
I have to share with you what I think is a very funny accidental incident. We have been harvesting our medicine and the other day we were sitting out in the yard in the sun clipping buds and throwing the clippings on the grass. I hope you can see the humor in those last words. Well, we kept at it for hours when suddenly one of our laying hens, who had been picking by my feet, out of the blue picked a fight with another hen. It got fierce and I had to go and literally kick them apart with my foot. They separated. Then the attacker hen started to try to crow like a rooster! It was hilarious to watch this biddy strut around and then posture and crow. Then “she” started to mount the other hens and a battle royal ended in the “rooster” taking cover in the hen house.
Now I suppose the behaviorists and anti-pot folks will all say “See!” when I tell you that I think she ate a lot of my bud clippings. And it most certainly altered the nature of this gentle old biddy hen. She’s OK now. All is forgiven in the hen house and the eggs didn’t fly. That’s all, folks.
(Note: I was very upset when I brought in my column. The wind blew shut the henhouse door and I thought all the chickens were in. They were not and most of my flock was killed in the night. I left the office in tears.)
(Doug Wright lives over Head Tide Hill in Whitefield. He welcomes feedback at douglas.wright22@yahoo.com.)
