If there’s anything we have gotten to know well in Hawaii, it is chickens. (Surprise!) I didn’t expect it, but Hawaii happens to be home to thousands and thousands of chickens. And it’s not necessarily the chickens that are surprising, it is their freedom; scattering across the streets, under buildings, into yards.
When we moved here, Lincoln knew quite a few animal noises, but he mastered the rooster’s crow pretty quickly, and soon perfected his mad dash towards every chicken within his sight. (A skill Eliot now has.)
And you would think that having been here for over 2 years now, I would be more used to the crowing that starts at 4:50 EVERY SINGLE MORNING, but in fact the opposite has happened. Now, almost every early morning I bound out of bed, turn the noisy fan on, and occasionally close all the windows between sighs of rage.
So when we went back home and visited my family, it was the first time the boys were introduced to the concept of chickens living in an enclosed space, and all the different things that it entails.
It was the first time they got to go in the chicken coop and look for the eggs and marvel at the tight bunch that the chickens hold within their own space, instead of the ragged running lines that are common here in Hawaii.
I’m sure that many people in Hawaii capture chickens and use them for their eggs (and probably more.) But the fact of the matter here is that they are mostly ornamental, if not annoyingly so. The general use of them has been forgotten and they have blended into the sights and sounds of Hawaii.
Hawaii, where the mountains and ocean extend beyond our sight and do very little except exist. As if that shouldn’t be enough, after all. As if the very fact that something exists has to be justified by practicality. Maybe the charm of Hawaii is mostly in how there is so much here that is purely beauty, purely too much of everything, past the point of usefulness.
But we’ll take the lesson in usefulness too, in the beauty of finding our own eggs in our own yards, in cleaning out frozen water buckets and filling it again with swirling fresh water, in being confused by enclosed spaces. And later, in the placing the warm eggs carefully in cartons and carrying them into the house for early breakfast throughout the week.
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