the birds and the bees 95She eyed me for a minute. “How much can I sell a dozen eggs for?”
“Nice brown organic eggs? Probably two- fifty a dozen. But remember,
you have to pay for feed. Your profit might be about a dollar a dozen.”
She disappeared into her room with the notebook. She was only a
second-grader then, as yet unacquainted with long division. I could only
assume she was counting off dollar bills on the calendar to get to fi ve hun-
dred. In a while she popped out with another question.
“How much can you sell chicken meat for?”
“Oh,” I said, trying to strike a morally neutral tone in my role as fi nan-
cial adviser, “organic chicken sells for a good bit. Maybe three dollars a
pound. A good- size roasting bird might net you ten dollars, after you sub-
tract your feed costs.”
She vanished again, for a very long time. I could almost hear the spiri-
tual wrestling match, poultry vs. equines, fur and feathers fl ying. Many
hours later, at dinner, she announced: “Eggs and meat. We’ll only kill the
mean ones.”
/
I know I’m not the first mother to make an idle promise I’d come to
regret. My mother- in-law has told me that Steven, at age seven, dashed
through her kitchen and shouted on the way through, “Mom, if I win a
monkey in a contest, can I keep it?” Oh, sure honey, Joann said, stirring
the pasta. She had seven children and, I can only imagine, learned to tune
out a lot of noise. But Steven won the monkey. And yes, they kept it.
In my case, what I’d posed as a stalling tactic turned out to be a power-
ful nudge, moving Lily from the state of loving something as much as her
mother (or six- sevenths as much) to a less sentimental position, to put it
mildly. I watched with interest as she processed and stuck to her choices.
I really had no idea where this would end.
Chicks must be started no later than April if they’re to start laying be-
fore cold weather. We moved to the farm in June, too late. From friends
we acquired a few mature hens to keep us in eggs, and satisfy Lily’s mini-
mum daily requirement of chicken love. But the farm- fresh egg business
had to wait. Finally, toward the end of our first winter here, we’d gotten
out the hatchery catalog and curled up on the couch to talk about a spring