Give Us This Day Our Daily Egg

Holding a chicken for the first time - and not realizing where this moment would take me!

LATE BREAKING NEWS: It's been ten years since we built the chicken coop.
I know! Time flies when you're laying eggs!

One of my favourite essays in Field Notes, the book, is the one from which I stole the title of this post. I wrote about discovering, from some deeply rooted place inside me that knew long before I did that my heart and home belonged in rural Nova Scotia, and that search would begin -- and end -- with a chicken coop in my backyard.
A few weeks after realizing that, I met the man who would make that dream, and others, a reality.

I think it's my favourite essays (of all my favourites) because it reminds me of how I came to be here, how I came to find contentment, how I came to rediscover the path I'd wandered off many years earlier.

In that essay I wrote, "It was my fear of big feet and swishing tails that made me decide seven-pound chickens were the perfect introduction to animal husbandry. Surely I could handle something small and light and feathery."
I could handle it -- and have enjoyed being a keeper of chickens, and chicks, for ten years. In that time, I've also milked a goat and learned to ride a horse, and I came THISCLOSE to upgrading the coop to a barn and filling with with big feet and swishing tails, but ultimately, I am destined to be The Girl With the Chicken On Her Shoulder.