Blog
Security and Adventure Redux: Beasts and Men
While humans presently constitute one-half of the Farm’s permanent residents (two people, two cats), they are soon to be outnumbered. This is not sci-fi prognostication but a mere expansion of our powers of production and self-sustenance. We are getting chickens. We have been struck by an extreme avifaunic desire described in the New Yorker last Autumn. Wrote Susan Orlean of her own yearnings in a late-September issue: “I suddenly found myself wanting chickens, and wanting them with an urgency that exceeded even my mad adolescent desire to have a pony.” Indeed.
As the snows are finally melting in Tamworth, we will soon be casting about local farms in order to assemble our own “peep.” We’ve settled on a breed – the noble Araucana (also known as the the “South American Rumpless”) – known for its blue-green eggs. The Araucana thereby affords its keepers a permanent, dye-less Easter.
We’ll also soon construct a suitable home for the chickens. The design will finally satisfy vicariously my own dream of inhabiting an A-frame cabin circa 1973.
