In recent days, my Good Wife and Gladys have been busy preparing some sumptuous culinary treats. In late winter, I had surmised that Gladys had opted for early retirement, but happily she has returned to full-time productivity. We are not getting an egg a day, after all she is not a Khaki Campbell duck, but we are getting a few eggs a week. Her contributions, plus my Good Wife’s domestic creativity, have combined to forge a splendid a repast on several occasions.
After two magnificent cheesecakes, they have turned to a 1-2-3-4 three-layer cake, of equal quality to that of the cheesecakes. In this iteration, the ingredients are one cup of milk, two sticks of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour and four eggs. As one goose egg equals two or three chicken eggs, two of Gladys’ eggs amply serve in lieu of the four hen eggs, but they are richer and creamier. Personally, I think the ratio is more three-to-one.
The only difficulty has been Gladys’s indecision about where to lay the eggs. Long ago, I gave up trying to teach her how to make a nest. She lays her eggs indiscriminately wherever she wants, but lately in difficult locations for me to retrieve. One is under the chickens’ nesting boxes; another is under the roosting house; still another is by the gate into the barnyard. When she chooses the former two spots, I must use a crab net to collect the eggs. I do not complain, as the eggs are such a great treat.
Gladys is forthright in all that she does. She offers no veiled or hidden meaning to her behavior. Henry, her erstwhile Platonic spouse, takes her for what she is, sometimes seeming to be especially glad to see me to have someone else at whom to honk, always gently. He is truly a gem of a gander.
Unlike Gladys, the chickens exhibit an aura of duplicity in the egg-laying arena, which I have experienced in others across the years. In their body language, they like to pretend that they have laid eggs, whether they have or not. We have eight chickens, and we get about four eggs each day, which means that either we have four faithful daily layers, or that the hens are rotating their productivity, and, of course, in the former scenario, some might not be laying any at all.
I have concluded that by pretending to be the layers of the day, they are in effect taking out an insurance policy that will assure their continued presence in the barnyard and not lead to a one-way trip to the stewpot. Clearly, they are unaware of our practice of allowing them to continue living on as retainers after egg production has ceased, in other words, when they have aged out of the laying period of their lives.
This spring, the eldest of the next generation of B.E.s watched two chicks hatch over several weeks of incubation in her kindergarten class. As school is drawing to a close, the question arose as to where the chicks would take up residence. The class decided that our barnyard would be the ideal place for them. They arrived last weekend, named by the class, “Ethan” and “Cherry.”
My Good Wife has obliged by allowing them temporary residency in a box with a heat lamp in the utility room until they feather out and are able to join the barnyard menagerie. They are too young for us to determine their gender, but if one proves to be a rooster, perhaps we can have some chicks in the offing, inasmuch as I have given up on expecting goslings, at least for the moment.
I gladly should give up the baked delights that Gladys makes possible in order to welcome goslings into the fold. In this case, I fear that once again the poet Alexander Pope has been proven to be correct when he declared that “hope springs eternal.”
