MILL CREEK, Miss. —
When the “Eggs for Sale” sign went up, I wasn’t all that surprised. My friend Barbara Moore has about 30 laying hens of several different types, and more eggs than she can give away. So now she sells a few — first come, first served.
The banty hens and the strange-looking silkies and the araucanas with their green eggs that Martha Stewart “discovered,” all of those chickens are busy girls, daily producing eggs that taste far better and have more nutrients than a white factory egg. Barbara’s eggs come in an array of colors, from a pale caramel to a rich milk-chocolate brown. And, of course, Easter-egg green. Each carton is a visual surprise.
The garden club in town posts its Yard of the Month sign invariably at houses where the lawns are manicured and the flowers perfectly arranged. Barbara’s yard is beautiful, too, but not in the planned and fastidious way of the town lawns. There should be another category for random creativity.
Not one, but two bright bottle trees are in the corner of the yard. Scrap materials Barbara plans on using eventually sit in sculptural heaps. Homemade coops and colorful umbrellas shelter her hens and roosters, and you can almost imagine that a carnival has set up overnight amidst the orange lilies and pink peonies.
Almost everything Barbara does is about her love for the animals, and there’s a Noah’s Ark feel to the wonderful and rambling blue country house that once belonged to her grandfather. When she moved home from Michigan in 2008, she wanted chickens like she’d grown up with and bought three hens and a rooster. The menagerie has had a haphazard evolution.
When Barbara’s rooster developed a sinus infection, she took him to a local vet. Jim Perkins was impressed with her concern and the care she gave the bird. He entrusted a hen that had been attacked by a dog to Barbara, who nursed it back to health. Perkins gave her more chickens, increasing her brood.
Today there is a flock of geese and 15 strutting roosters and a homemade pen with rabbits. Barbara inherited what is called a “confusion” of guineas, about 20, from neighbors. But the guineas are aptly named and bad to wander into the road. She’s down to four.
Old John, the golden dog who belonged to her late uncle, often chooses to nap on the warm pavement. Drivers must sit and blow their horn and wait for him to get up slowly, stretch and, in his own good time, move. Local residents know to watch for him.
The road by Barbara’s house used to be a quiet country lane with little traffic, a forgiving place when it comes to free-range country animals. These days, weekenders on their way to Pickwick Lake fly by wagging bass boats on trailers. Barbara shakes her head, crosses her fingers and builds another pen.
“They are speeding their way through life. Those fish aren’t going anywhere.”
The animals define her life, its routines and rituals. Every night she endures the wrath of the crippled rooster that must stay in the living room in a box with cedar shavings so he won’t get carried off by coyotes. Pooper was attacked by a goose when an infant and needs to sleep on his own heating pad.
“He probably should have been put down when it happened, but I can’t kill anything.”
The beauty of her unconventional yard is in the general coexistence of all those honking, clucking, barking, mewing pets. It’s only the humans speeding by that wreak havoc.
Opinion
Green eggs with your ham
- Opinion
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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