Some days I can hear a goat in the distance, other days a cow. This is probably as close to living in the country as I'll get and it is a far cry from country life. The chickens really bring this bucolic illusion home with their almost constant talking. It's the Dellies that talk. They hit the six month mark and started laying, almost all within the same week. They are still shocked at their ability to produce and have claimed bragging rights. Once they do it everyday for a year, the novelty will wear off and the proclamations will stop.

The Dellies have to maneuver around angry Lucy to get to the nest box. Lucy has made it her mission to make their lives a living hell. Lucy is the great gatekeeper and a merciless one at that. It's as if the Dellies have to answer one of her nonsensical chicken riddles to gain passage to a nestbox.

This morning I watched as Jo was turned away repeatedly. She paced back and forth behind the coop. The rate of her pacing increased and the urgency of the egg bearing down reached a crescendo culminating in a grand attempt to leap the six foot fence that separates our house and the next. She desperately wanted to find someplace, any place that would offer her a little privacy for the impending lay.

It was her failed leap that drew me to the yard to gather up all the Dellies and lock them up safely in the coop where there are two newly lined boxes for their laying pleasure. They have food with scratch and sunflower seeds and some apple cider water.

Lucy stewed and stared at them through the wire but eventually lost interest. My morning was spent as hen referee. It is a chore for the homebound, really. It's such a slow paced activity but my mind is racing all the while calculating the minutes until I have to leave for work and at the same time craving a good sitting to read. There is breakfast to make and packages to wrap. The minutes seem to fly by.

It's all such a rush until the evening. I come home just after dark. I check on the hens one last time and evertime, without fail, I find them lined up in a row, side by side as if they were best friends with nary a cruel peck between them.