Pigs, Chickens, Coyotes and Buzzards - Oh My!

 About two months ago, a chicken showed up on Perry Street in Centerville.  Now, there are a few people who have chickens in town, but this was a lone renegade hen that no one recognized.  And no one could catch her, although a few people tried.  So, she wanders through the neighborhood.  My friend Alice told me that she was hanging around her house quite a bit and I said, “She’s probably laying eggs somewhere. Y’all need to find her nest and have fresh eggs.”

One of her neighbors across the street starting feeding her, hoping, I think, that she would become tame enough to catch and relocate, but she remained elusive, although she did spend most of her time close by.  From time to time I would say to Alice, “That hen is laying eggs somewhere around there.  And if she finds a rooster, she will set on those eggs.”

Sure enough, Alice called me the other day and said, “The neighborhood hen has a whole bunch of baby chicks following her out in our front lot.”  This lot faces the highway and is bordered on  the other side by Perry Street.  Not a good location for free range chickens. I believe a family who raise 4-H chickens has been contacted to try and corral the hen and chicks.

You just never know what you will see in a rural county.  Last week I picked up a friend out on a back road and we were driving along when I saw something odd on the side of the road.  I thought at first it was a flock of birds, but when they started running down the road, I was pretty sure it wasn’t birds.  “What is that?” I asked.  Rena peered out the windshield and after a moment said, “Those are pigs!”  Sure enough, it was a whole herd, or whatever you call a group of pigs, of tiny baby piglets.  It looked like about twenty, but we were later told there were only ten.  I mean, these were little pigs – and no mama in sight.  They ran full speed in a tight formation as they scurried up the road then turned, still in formation, into their driveway and around to the back of the house.  It reminded me of a marching band, but much faster.  I looked at Rena and said, “Maybe we don’t need to tell anyone about seeing this.”  But of course we did.  I keep meaning to drive back down there and see if I can see them again.

Some time back, we were eating lunch at our favorite barbecue spot, on a hill going up toward the town square.  When I pulled in, I noticed five or six police cars parked a few hundred yards away and officers milling around in the weeds,  At first I thought it was a wreck.  When I asked, the lady at the counter said, “They are looking for a coyote.”  My first thought was that if they wanted a coyote, they could just come out to my house at night and find all they wanted, but this was apparently a specific coyote.  A man walking up the highway had called and reported being chased by a coyote and officers were dispatched to find the coyote. 

Now, there were a couple of things wrong with this plan.  First, if a coyote were to be chasing a man, I’m pretty sure the coyote would catch the man. There might be Olympic runners who could outrun a coyote but we don’t have any of those in Centerville.  Second, if a coyote had been chasing a man, I’m pretty sure the coyote would not be sitting around in the weeds waiting for the police to come looking for him.  “That coyote is long gone,” I told the lady at the counter.  We watched out the window while we ate our sandwiches and after about thirty minutes, they left without a coyote. I hope the coyote does not visit Perry Street and encounter the hen and chicks. 

This brought to mind another wildlife story about my hometown that has become somewhat of a legend.  Several years ago, a flock of buzzards took up a home in the trees around the city park.  No doubt they were a nuisance, and some people were concerned about the safety of their small dogs and cats.  Calls to city hall poured in and it was clear that something needed to be done about the buzzards.  But one remedy suggested to get rid of them was to hang a dead buzzard in one of the trees where they were roosting.  Here’s where the story took a bizarre turn.  Now, it is illegal to kill a buzzard, but upon contacting wildlife officials, it turns out that they actually have official dead buzzards in a freezer at one of their headquarters.  For the sum of, I believe, $120 the town officials were told they could come and get one of these official dead buzzards to hang in a tree.  Stanley Gordon was selected to make the trip.  He was given the money and off he went.  Upon his return, someone was dispatched to the park to hang the dead buzzard.  It seemed to work.  The buzzards, apparently alarmed by the corpse, found other places to roost.

A few days later, a group went on a visit to the park and spotted the dead buzzard hanging in the tree.  It caused quite a stir, and some of the people in the group got the idea that it was some sort of satanic ritual and called the police in a state of agitation.  An officer was dispatched to check out the body and apparently had not heard of the official dead buzzard, so he climbed up, cut the buzzard down and threw it into a gully.  The live buzzards returned to the park, although I believe in smaller numbers, and there was no more talk of dead buzzards in trees, official or not.  I think at least some of the buzzards are now roosting on some of the buildings on the town square. Sometimes it’s best to just leave well enough alone when it comes to coyotes and buzzards in a small town.

UPDATE:  The hen and chicks have been captured and are on their way to a new home.  No word on who the rooster might be who would be responsible for chick support.

 

 

72 Hours

 

About the middle of the week, I became aware of the forecast of an impending snow and ice event for my area of Middle Tennessee.  Such forecasts come along a couple of times every winter and more often than not, they don’t happen or turn into minor events.  But this one seemed a little more certain than most and people began stockpiling bread, milk and toilet paper.  I’ve never quite understood this obsession with toilet paper – I’ve been snowbound a few times in my life and never used all that much toilet paper.  I don’t drink milk, so that doesn’t enter into my plans, and I don’t really use that much bread either.  I did stock up on Dr. Pepper and snacks and at the last minute decided to buy some sandwich makings in case the electricity went off and I couldn’t cook.  I made a pot of potato soup and a cake.  Turns out, the potato soup was pretty useless, but I’ve eaten over half the cake.

I bought extra dog food and a new stock tank heater for my horses’ water trough, and I made sure we filled up the water, unhooked the hoses and put some buckets over the hydrants to keep the ice off the handles.  That was about the extent of my storm prep.

I woke up Saturday morning to snowfall and an already white landscape.  The dogs loved it – Scout especially is happiest outside when it’s in the 30’s.  He never gets the memo about bringing your pets inside when it’s cold.  Saturday was uneventful, although we did call off church for the next day.  That was okay and I had soup and cake to eat for lunch.  Or so I thought.

When I woke up Sunday morning, it was to the peculiar silence that means the power is off broken only by the hiss of sleet hitting the roof.  When I stumbled to the door, the trees were coated in ice.  I am only three miles from the center of town, but due to an oddity in how the electric lines run to our road, when the power goes off, sometimes it stays off for quite a while.  The predicted temperatures for Sunday and Monday nights were in single digits.  Serious stuff.  I have a fireplace with gas logs so I knew I wouldn’t freeze, but I was worried a little about the horses and the water.  I got down the kerosene lamp from the mantle, glad that it was almost full of oil and had a wick.  I retrieved blankets and a quilt from my bedroom, closed off the living room from the rest of the house, settled in with a book, and ate more cake.

That night, I sat in front of the fire, wondering just how long the power would be out.  The fire was burning steadily, doing its best to keep the room bearable.  I thought about fire and what a miracle it is.  Besides air, water and food, I suppose it is the most important thing for life over the centuries.  I have been reading Hal Borland lately and I thought about an essay he wrote on trees and how the trees store up heat from the sun and how that warmth lives again with the burning of its branches in the winter.  No wonder people over the centuries have gathered around a fire, its warmth welcoming friends and making friends of strangers.  My fireplace is usually a comfortable extra, adding to the coziness of the big living room, but in this situation, it became an essential. 

For the next three nights, I slept on the couch in front of that fire, under two blankets, two fuzzy throws, a quilt and my winter coat, dressed in sweat pants, sweat shirt, a fuzzy robe and socks.  Trips to the bathroom were like treks to the Arctic with only a flashlight to guide me.  It occurred to me that all those quilts displayed in an old glass front cabinet once warmed members of my family – no wonder that are so many of them, and that same fireplace used to be the only heat in these rooms.  When I was a little girl, we burned wood in the fireplace and I remember running into the living room every morning to stand in front of the fire before getting dressed.    Often there was an animal of some kind by the fire – a baby lamb, newborn calf or pig that needed some extra attention to survive.  I’m not sure why animals pick the coldest nights to give birth, but that seems to be the way it is.  The dogs were happy to have me in their domain – pressing cold noses to my face occasionally to make sure I was okay.  Joey was the only one willing to burrow into the small space on the couch with me, but Sophie slept right beside the couch.  Scout guarded the door and Carli slept at the other end of the couch. 

After the first night, I learned a couple of things.  One was to light the kerosene lamp before it got dark.  Another was to arrange my bedding on the couch while it was still daylight.  And always make sure you know where the flashlight is before you go to bed.

The sun came out the next morning and transformed the landscape into a sparkling jewelry box.  Even though I hated it for the people working out in the ice to clear road and restore power, it was breathtakingly beautiful, trees draped in diamonds reflecting every color of the rainbow.  I used a few bars of battery to snap a few pictures with my phone, but it didn’t capture the effect.  Birds swarmed the feeders, breaking the silence with their chirps and arguments. 

I read two books, worked three jigsaw puzzles, ate cake and snack crackers, wished for a battery operated cd player so I could have music, took everything out of set of cabinets and began sorting through stacks of old photo albums, played with the dogs, and filled bird feeders several times a day. 

In the love/hate relationship I have with social media and news, I realized how valuable it can be to bring people together.  The only means of charging my phone was to plug in to my running car periodically and that meant braving the icy driveway.  The bright side was that it was the only time I was truly warm unless I was under my layers of cover.  As much as I hate the news, not knowing what was happening outside my little corner of the world was worrying at times and I was eager to hear from friends about how they were doing.  We really are too addicted to our phones.  Missing the contact for a few days made me realize the aloneness our ancestors must have felt with no instant communication or easy travel.  Not only were lines down, but roads were blocked so many people couldn’t get in or out if they needed to.

We are not as self sufficient as we used to be.  My dad and granddaddy would have taken the tractor and the chain saw and cut the trees out of the road.  I don’t have a chain saw (although I have always wished for one), couldn’t use it if I had it and it would probably have been out of gas or out of order anyway.  My neighbors got the road cleared on Tuesday but I knew my car would not make it out of my own driveway so I stayed put.

I did discover that I could make do pretty well for a seventy-year-old, with a lot of help from my young neighbor and her grandfather.  I learned that I could live on peanut butter, cold sandwiches and cake.  I also discovered the joy of putting words on paper using an actual pencil instead of typing them out on the computer.  But I was surely happy when I saw the big truck from the electric company on my road on Wednesday morning.  And when the lights and heat suddenly came on at noon, I said a little prayer of thanks, along with a heap of prayers for all the people still without electricity.  I was one of the lucky ones.

 

Memories for Christmas

 

Here we are, almost Christmas Eve, and once again, I didn’t get everything done I meant to do this year.  I finally got my tree and my house decorated, but I didn’t get any cookies and candy made.  I had planned to make little treat boxes for my friends, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.  I haven’t even taken the time to drive around and view Christmas lights, although that may still happen.  I spent way too much time playing with the dogs, sold a puppy along the way, and managed to plan and implement our church Christmas program.  Someone asked me why I bother will all the decorations when it’s just me.  The fact that it’s just me is exactly why I bother.  Over seventy years of memories is why I bother, not counting the memories from the years before I was even born.  I said the other day that it’s obscene how many decorations I have, but then I thought about how long I have been accumulating, not to mention all the stuff my mom and grandmother and great-grandmother accumulated and it’s actually surprising that the house can hold all of it!  And just about everything holds a memory.

There is my collection of Christmas dogs, beginning with a little white terrier in a Santa hat  I bought not long after Robert and I were married.
 There are the things my mom and I made when we were all into sewing and crafts – a braided fabric wreath and stuffed Christmas wreath and a stuffed bear my aunt made for me.  There is my old Christmas stocking and a wooden sleigh from my childhood that may have also been my daddy’s.

 
There are the ornaments that my friends made for me, or gave me, and ornaments my family gave me.  Some of the ornaments on my tree came from my great grandmother’s trees, and my grandparent’s trees, then the trees my parents decorated when I was just a baby, and the trees my husband and I decorated.  There are some tarnished bells that I still use every year because, as discolored as they are, they remind me of those childhood Christmases with my Colley relatives, when they would drive down from Nashville and Franklin, calling out “Christmas Gift” as they walked in the door and bringing what I thought were exotic dishes like mincemeat pie and scalloped oysters and gifts from places like Castner Knott and Cain Sloan. 

And books, always a new book, usually about horses.  I have dozens of inscribed books, beginning with little Golden Books my family gave me all the way through my childhood to teenaged novels I received.

 My family were all great readers.  Growing up, there were shelves and shelves of books in our house with names of people I never even knew in person, but knew through the pages of the books they left.  Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, the works of Charles Dickens, Black Beauty, Peter Pan – I was introduced to books like those, not in school, but during lazy summers in the porch swing. The first time I read A Christmas Carol was from a maroon covered set of Dickens that belonged to my great grandfather Tom Colley.  The print was so small, it's a wonder I was able to do it!

I remember listening wide-eyed to stories of my grandmother and her sisters remembering Christmases when they were children in the big house their father built in town when he brought his new wife from Franklin to the wilds of small-town Centerville. 

That house, with its window seats, wide front porch and gabled windows became a source of fascination to me.  They made it sound like something from a book, with stories of church on Christmas Eve and Christmas mornings when their father would get up early to build a fire in the library fireplace so they could open their gifts under the tree.  Sometimes I wish that house was still there, but then sometimes I think that it might be better that the house just lives on in my imagination.  It would be disturbing if it had been altered and modernized, or worse still, fallen into disrepair and decay.  And I have the piano, a dining room buffet and a bookcase that came from that house to remind me of that past, along with those little tarnished Christmas bells that I still love, not because of their beauty but because of the memories they hold.

More recent memories involve my mom and houseful of kids she “kept” after she retired from public work.  I can still hear echoes of squeals of laughter as they opened the presents they exchanged in a sea of wrapping paper and ribbons.  I can still see them all, sitting around the big dining room table, and arguing over the last piece of cornbread or that last spoonful of corn.  They were family too, and I hope they hold good memories of those days.  They read some of the same books I read, Little Golden books from my childhood and books like Little House on the Prairie that had been read by three generations of our family. 

I have pictures of so many of the kids in my daddy’s lap with books, and I remember the days when I would visit and hear small voices begging “read to me.”  I hope they read to their own children now and I hope they tell them about their memories of times on the farm when they were growing up.  This house holds a lot of good memories and if there are ghosts, they are peaceful and mild-mannered ghosts.  I feel them at my elbow sometimes as I sit by the fire with the dogs, watching the Christmas lights twinkle and holding fast to good memories.  Those memories are the only Christmas gift I need.