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.

 

 

Shooting Stars

 

I missed seeing the shooting stars from the Perseid Meteor Showers this week.  It always seems to be cloudy in my part of the world during these events, or maybe I just don’t have the patience to hang around long enough for the clouds to end.  But I did witness shooting stars off another kind last weekend, at a performance by the Hickman County Performing Arts Group.   It was their final performance before several of the teens go off to the rest of their lives.  Their story is amazing – their journey has been something to witness.

It was a little over a year ago when a few teens came up with the idea of putting on shows to raise funds for their senior year at the local high school.  We, as part of the board at the local Ag Pavilion and Fairgrounds, had worked with the local 4-H and other groups to sponsor a Youth Arts Festival for a couple of years.  We wanted to give the kids, from kindergarten and up, a place to show their artistic side, make a little money, and earn some prizes.  We had no idea what we were starting.   The participants showed up with drawings, photographs, paintings, jewelry, baking, and sculpture, along with performances in dance, music and theatre.  It was a great day.

Shortly after the festival, the teens asked if we would let them create a few of their own musical shows.  All we really had to do was open the doors, hang around for a couple of hours, supervise the building of sets and give a little advice when needed.  The kids wrote the script, chose the music, designed the program, painted the scenery and roped their parents into helping with concessions and taking up money at the door.  They flooded social media and local newspapers with promotion for their first show, back in August of 2024 and they were off at a gallop.  

Their first show was called Artist Showcase, and it lived up to its name.  Raw talent stepped on stage, a few performers for their very first time.  The rafters shook from the percussion of a rock band, an elegant young dancer graced the stage, and a college student’s performance on the old, neglected piano made the audience forget it was just an old, out-of-tune instrument .  And then there was the singing.  We discovered a gold mine of talent, right here in our midst. One of the most stunning performances came from a shy, young girl who had never sung in public and now has taught herself to play guitar and is finding solo gigs all over town.

As the performances came and went, the loyal fans watched shyness melt away, confidence increase, command of the stage blossom and new faces appear to make us forget for a couple of hours that we were just watching a group of kids we had known since their preschool days.  By the fourth or fifth show, the group had met their fundraising goal.  On their own, they decided to use part of the remaining funds for a scholarship to help a senior further his or her arts journey.  Their journey took a few detours, as they branched out into performances and volunteer work at other venues.  Some of them performed at Christmas on the Square and the Ag and Arts Tour After Concert, helped with the Haunted Tour of the Square,  sang on the local radio and at other events, big and small.  They shone in the high school plays, and the leader of the group was grand marshal of the Halloween parade. 

The seventh show, a salute to rock and roll, was supposed to be their last, but they decided to do a retrospective of all their performances.  Anniversary Anthem was presented last week, a farewell to many and an introduction to the new host and a promise to continue the project.  The remaining performers already have a lot of big ideas. There were some tears, but mostly there was pride – pride in the growth and maturity reached over the past year.  They are all shooting stars, and we can’t wait to see where they land.

 

 

The Wind's Gift

 

The wind left me a gift yesterday.  As I got in my truck after church, I found a perfect oak leaf on my seat, painted by autumn.  One leaf, such a simple thing but so amazing.  It’s one of the things I love about fall – when the trees put on their party dresses and the air grows cool and quiet.  When I sit on my front porch, I can hear the silence.  The birds are subdued, the insects whisper and even the owls in the holler sound sleepy.  The autumn light is drifting lower in the southern sky and the stars take on more clarity, moving in their eternal journey across the heavens.  I feel sorry for city dwellers, who can seldom see the stars through the city lights.  There is a feeling of connection, looking at the big dipper and knowing that we are looking at the same group of stars that the stone age men saw.  Our ancestors sailed to the new world, guided in part by the constellations that have graced the sky since the beginning of time and will remain after we are gone.  Just like the changing of the leaves and the new buds that appear the following spring, we follow the familiar cycle of each year.

Just like the cycles of the seasons, we create our own traditions to go along with those cycles. In my little town, we have just passed a busy month, which seems to have come and gone at warp speed.  Halloween  is celebrated here with a vengeance, and this year the town square has been invaded by an army of skeletons.  Creativity flowed as businesses fought to outdo each other in decorating light poles.  We ran out of poles early on, so the creations spilled over into freestanding displays in grassy areas and even crept off the square to the highways leading to town.  Skelebrate Halloween was the theme and it was a joy to watch families tour the sidewalks, examining skeleton carpenters, auto repair skeletons, dentist and pharmacist skeletons, Edgar Allen Poe, Minnie Pearl, and the Wicked Witch (with a Toto skeleton  in her basket), even a skeleton horse pulling a buggy.  Then there was my favorite – Willie Nelson sitting beside our Minnie Pearl statue, strumming his famous guitar. 

Against this backdrop, back-to-back events took place, one old favorite  and the other in its first year.  A Haunted Tour of the Square led participants on a walk around town to hear spooky stories rooted in the town’s history, including a ghostly trip to the centuries-old town cemetery.  The following night it was the Halloween Parade, a particularly unique event invented by a Halloween loving family when their lawn decorating efforts outgrew their lawn over ten years ago.  Every year the parade seems to get a little bigger, the crowds seem to grow a little larger, and the amount of candy thrown off the floats and out of the cars boggles the mind.  It’s as much fun to watch the kids, many giving their Halloween costumes a trial run before trick or treat night itself, enjoying the floats and picking up the candy as it is to watch the parade.  I stood beside a family with two of the cutest little boys – a red-head and a tow-head and both dedicated harvesters of candy.  The red-head in particular with his backwards baseball cap was single-minded in his pursuit of the treats.   On the other side was a baby who looked to be about 6 or 8 months old.  I would love to have known what was going through her little mind as she watched the string of ghosts, goblins, giant pumpkins and other creatures fill the streets of Centerville.  After the parade, her young parents posed for pictures with their baby, so that even if she has no memory of her own about this night, she will know that she was there. It's one of life's great blessings to live in a place where so many people go to so much trouble just to make things fun for our kids!

By the actual night of Halloween, the skeletons were beginning to look a little bedraggled and the perfect weather for the previous weekend’s festivities had morphed into a cloudy, rainy evening.  Not to be deterred, a cavalcade of costumed trick or treaters took to the streets, tramping up and down the pavement calling “Trick or treat.”   There is no way to estimate numbers, but my friends who live on the most popular trick or treat street ran out of candy by 6:30. 

And so, with the turning of the calendar page, November is here.  Jack-o-Lanterns are replaced by turkeys and pilgrims and thoughts turn to making apple pies and cornbread dressing.  The trees are shedding their party clothes and a carpet of red and gold covers the yard.  Daylight savings time ends – tell me again why we keep doing this – and afternoons are way too short.  Now, if I can just remember what size turkey I bought last year and where I put the extra tablecloths.