A chicken keeper had a near miss with one of her hens. Last week Rose Red went missing. Admittedly when you allow your flock to free range, the practice does involve the risk of predators. Occasionally you lose one. As another chicken farmer's husband says, "If you are going to have livestock, you are going to have dead stock."

 

Yet my friend felt like the chicken was alive. There were no tell tale feathers in the yard, or signs of a ruckus. She owns a Newfoundland whose task is to keep the foxes at bay, and being over a hundred and thirty pounds is definitely a deterrent. Yet two, three, even four days went by and Rose Red did not come home to roost. 

 

Then on the fifth day as my friend was cleaning the coop, she noticed a dust bathing pan that had been upturned. When she righted it, there was Rose Red. The bird blinked, stretched her wings, and strutted off into the sunshine to take a very long drink. Where she had been sitting were five brown eggs. 

 

Another woman wrote to me about a friend.

 

"She is a quiet woman whose family traveled to many countries after WW2 so she grew up in Hong Kong and Dominican Republic, while he came from Vietnam Nam. They had two kids and settled down to wait for those boys to grow up so they could divorce. Each year she was unhappy and counting the days. Towards the end of the younger son's high school her husband had a heart attack. She nursed him thru it and they are still married fifteen years later. They may have never committed to the marriage but the marriage committed to them."

 

Both stories strike me as miraculous. Things like birds and love go missing. For days, or years. And then sometimes when we forgot to keep looking, there it is. Blinking and breathing.