The Long Good Days

Author’s Note: this essay is part of the Reports from the High Wood series, a weekly premium report from our homestead that offers you enduring lessons for living well in a wounded world. If you're drawn to green paths, perennial values, and timeless beauty that resists the modern glare, you're in the right place.

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This morning began like a page torn from some idealized Vermont almanac: clear sky, early sun, coffee warm in hand, and a list of things to do. I had a plan: drop off a broken dish washer at the dump, feed the bees their sugar syrup while the hives were just beginning to warm up and start working, then head to town in the afternoon to pick up the dozen new barred rock chicks I had promised my daughter. It was a good list. Efficient, appropriate for the season, satisfying.

Not thirty minutes into the day however, the phone rang. The chicks had arrived early. Could we come get them this morning instead?

That one call unraveled the day’s rhythm. The dump would have to wait and the bees would get their syrup later than I had intended. The tempo I had imagined gave way to something less structured. I sighed, loaded up my excited daughter, headed into town, and we retrieved twelve tiny peeping lights. She cradled the box all the way home with both arms as if it were something sacred. She laughed at how they pecked at the box. Later, she sat in the sun room introducing herself to each chick, pointing out the subtle differences between each one and wondering which was the rooster we had requested. Watching her, I realized none of it had been on the list yet it had become the best part of the day. What I had planned as an errand had bloomed into something hallowed. It reminded me that the good old perennial ways like letting children fall in love with tiny, living things require no improvement. They don’t need optimization or efficiency; they need but time and space.

The good old patterns endure, just as surely as chicks still arrive in cardboard boxes at the hardware store each year.

The Hen-Roost, Charles Emile Jacque