Julia's Chocolates. Cathy Lamb

I am proud in a weird sort of way that I can lose it while still appreciating nature’s beauty.

      I pushed my hand over my hat, squishing it down on my curls. It was the crack of dawn, and I was feeding Aunt Lydia’s chickens. I hadn’t showered yet, and I was positive I stunk like chicken shit. I also had wet mud sliming down my legs and hay all over my plaid shirt, which hung almost to my knees, because I slipped when I was petting the piglets. They’d all gathered around at once, and I’d lost my balance.

      Although I slept well the night of Breast Power Psychic Night, I did not sleep the next two nights for more than a few hours, and when I did, I dreamed of Robert chasing me with a pickax.

      A pickax is an unusual object. It looks mean and nasty. But there it was. I was not surprised in my dream to see Robert holding that pickax. Nor did it particularly frighten me. What frightened me was that Robert was smiling. A smile that was so gentle, so endearing, it made me feel sick with high-octane panic.

      In my dream I started running. You know how in your dreams when you run, you just can’t move, and the person who is chasing you catches up with lightning speed, and the reason you can’t run is because your legs are all tangled up in your sheet, and you’re sweating, a river of water gushing down your face?

      It was not like that at all. In these pickax dreams, I ran. So fast, so hard, so long. I hid around buildings and waited. Robert would appear, pickax above his head, and grinning. I would turn at the last minute before my imminent death, run again, this time hiding behind a bridge, and there he would come again. Smiling. So gentle. So endearing. And he’d swing. He’d miss me by inches, and I would sprint at high speed to the country, and there, behind a tractor, he’d find me, and he’d still be smiling.

      This went on until he finally got me. I saw my mother laughing in the distance, her dyed blond hair flying behind her. My father was on his motorcycle. He sped away.

      I woke up cold—freezing, in fact—my whole body shaking so hard I grabbed the pink comforter on the bed and wrapped myself up like a caterpillar. A very scared caterpillar.

      After ascertaining he was not near, that this was not another hiding place, I willed myself to breathe again, in and out. Then, when that didn’t work, I gave up. I picked up a book on tending roses next to my bed and read. I read every single word. Forcing myself to concentrate. I learned about fertilizers, traditional versus organic, and all kinds of rose bugs, and different types of soil, and how to water your roses.

      At some point I fell asleep, and in my next dream Robert was chasing me through a rose garden with that same pickax in his hand. In his other hand he carried a book on roses. I woke up with the rose book on my chest, the sunrise peeking through the wooden slats of my bedroom window.

      Deciding I had had enough nightmares, I got up, dressed in a couple of old shirts Aunt Lydia kept in the white wicker furniture chests in the room, and headed out to the barns.

      I knew Aunt Lydia was there already. She needed only a few hours of sleep a night, said sleeping was boring and she could get absolutely nothing done in bed. “After I’m dead I’ll have plenty of time to sleep. Right now I’m alive, and I’ve got things to do.”

      Plus, 370 hungry chickens.

      Aunt Lydia sold the eggs to the local store in town and to two stores in neighboring towns. People often called her “The Egg Lady.” She loved it. Every day, for hours and hours, she would work with her chickens. Picking up their eggs, cleaning out the barns, making sure “the ladies” had time to run and play in special areas she had gated off for them.

      She sent me to the smaller barn at first when she saw me. She simply pointed, and I knew where to go, and I trudged through to the barn after a short detour to the pigpen. Melissa Lynn snorted her way over and licked my hand. I bent down and put my hands around her neck. She nuzzled my face, snorting happily. The piglets snorted, too, and I laughed.

      The laughter felt good, freeing, as if it had been held down by a lead lid and chains for years. I gave them all another hug, fell on my butt in the puddle, and the piglets snorted away, already busy with their day, things to do, troughs to eat out of, mud to roll in. The life of a pig is very busy, you know.

      When I stood outside the barn—painted purple, of course, for good luck and good sex, Aunt Lydia had said—I could hear “the ladies” clucking, soft and comfortable, as if they were snoozing.

      Then, as if they had a sixth sense and knew I was there and freedom and food were only seconds away, their clucking took a new turn, sounding shrill and strident, as if someone were dropping their bottoms into a pail full of ice and giving them a little shake.

      I opened the barn door.

      Shocked, I could only stare at what seemed like a million chickens flying out the door, their mellow clucking changing to high-pitched squawking. When one flew at my head, I ducked, stood again, then had to lean to my right to avoid another chicken, then to my left, then back down again.

      Chicken after chicken flew out of that barn. I could almost hear their commentary: “Who the hell is that? She didn’t open the door right! Where’s Lydia? What is this barn coming to, when the servants quit?”

      When the stampede was over, the ladies settled and pecked at the ground, I ventured into their domain. Lydia had told me the night before where many of the eggs would be. She had painted different bookshelves bright colors and lined them up against the walls or laid them flat against the wood chips and hay. She always put a golf ball on the shelves so the chickens would think they were looking at a real egg and, as she said, feel comfortable about dropping their insides.

      The chickens loved it, laying eggs every day. When the chickens were too old and not laying anymore, Lydia gave them away to a group that would send fresh chicken breasts out to women’s shelters and homeless places in the city. She hated sending chickens away and often kept them long after they were good for egg-laying.

      On the day her friend Albert brought his truck around to transport the older chickens to the Chicken Slice and Dice business, as she called it, she would always help load the chickens, blowing them kisses, hugging them tightly, then go to bed for the rest of the day and cry and grieve as if she’d given away her best friends.

      But the next day, it was business as usual. Did I mention that Aunt Lydia is a hard-core businesswoman?

      So I went through the bookshelves and the nests, then looked for the “secret piles,” as Lydia calls them—places where the chickens all like to lay their eggs. Every so often, she’ll find a new “secret pile.”

      This, I think, is the ladies’ way of keeping secrets. They all lay their eggs in some nook or cranny—between the bookshelves, behind them, anywhere—and finally Aunt Lydia will find the hoard. Usually there’s about seventy eggs by that time, and even as she’s pulling them out and putting them in her baskets, the ladies will wander over and lay more eggs.

      So the secret gig is up, but the ladies know it’s a good place to relieve themselves, so they carry on a bit more.

      I heard Aunt Lydia come in the barn.

      “Darlin,’ Julia,” she yelled. “Saw the chickens flying at your face a bit ago. Too bad I didn’t have my camera. Now wouldn’t that be dandy? We could win a million dollars on one of those TV shows.”

      “The ladies were a little anxious to get out today.”

      “The ladies are always anxious to get out. They don’t do much, but what they do they’re used to doing. They like routines. Oh, now”—a chicken pecked at her hand when Lydia reached in to get the egg—“don’t be hormonal, Tizzy.”

      Lydia names all the chickens as she goes. Who could remember all those names anyhow?

      “There ya go, Jessalynn,” she soothed as she took another egg from yet another late-morning riser, not so eager to get outside today. “This one is much kinder than the other, but I prefer Tizzy.”

      “You prefer Tizzy?” I saw a white egg sticking out of hay bunched together in a small cubbyhole