This Journal is a bit late. We were gone all weekend and just got home. More on that later.
Monday was Labor Day, a holiday, but I didn’t do anything. There was no school. I was home by myself. Hannah and Josiah were still in Tennessee. Stacey was en route from Arizona. I spent the day working in the garden. Stacey arrived home that evening. That made it seem like a holiday at last.
Stacey and I got to spend the rest of the week together, just the two of us – while we were home anyway. We went to a movie one night, but we spent most evenings just puttering around the house. It seemed odd at meal time, but cleaning up was easy. I guess this was good practice for us. Soon it will be that way most of the time.
I spent most of Tuesday making jelly. It was a perfect day for it. I had lots of elderberries to work with and ended up making 21 pints of jelly. The rest of the week I was in school, so I didn’t get much else done.
On Friday Stacey and I drove to the Foster’s (Sarah and Tosh’s) house in Detroit after work. It’s a seven and a half hour drive for us. We arrived there just before midnight. Tosh was there. The Thayns, Miriam, Hannah, and Josiah were already there having arrived a few hours before us. Sarah, who has been on an adventure on the West Coast, arrived home on Saturday. It was so great to spend the weekend together. Sarah and Tosh have only been in their house a few months and are still settling in. We took up all their bedrooms and couches. We used all their dishes at dinner time. We filled their house right up. It was great. We spent Saturday sitting around and playing games, just enjoying being together. This morning we went to church then went back to the Foster’s for lunch and then headed home again. The Thayns left right after we did. Miriam is now living with Sarah and Tosh, so she stayed. It was a quick trip and a lot of time spent in the car, but it was so good to be together. Now we are home. Hannah and Josiah are home and the house feels a bit more alive again.
 |
| Hazel. |
 |
| June. |
 |
| Playing games. |
 |
| After church. |
 |
| Tosh, Hazel, and an i-Pad. |
 |
| Josiah, June, and Hazel. |
 |
| We stopped at Kirtland on the way home. |
While Josiah was in Tennessee, I took over doing his chores down at the barn. There was a time years ago when I was the one who took care of the chickens. When Daniel was old enough, he took over and when he left, Josiah took over. Now they will all be gone and the job will revert to me once more. I don’t mind. I like the chickens. So last Monday while I was down doing the chores, I noticed a clutch of eggs in the wrong place. The hens usually lay their eggs in the nesting boxes. These eggs were in a corner of the “chick” section of the coop – the sequestered area where we keep new chicks until they’re old enough to join the main flock. This year’s chicks are grown up and with the main flock now and the chick pen has been empty and its door open for months. I don’t know why the hens decided to make a nest in there. There were 10 eggs. We’ve had three hens that went broody a few weeks back (Josiah informs me they were Doris, Incarnacion, and one of the black hens, he couldn’t tell which one). They were setting in the nesting boxes, which are not suitable for hatching eggs, so we kept taking the eggs out from under them every day, hoping they’d soon get over their broodiness. Well, when I saw that nest of eggs on the chick pen floor, I had a great idea. I took one of those broody hens, Doris it turns out, and shut her up in the chick pen, hoping she would sit on that clutch of eggs and hatch them. There are few things in this world stranger than a broody hen. They are like partial zombies. They sit on their nests all fluffed up day and night. They squeal when you disturb them. They only get off their nest once a day to eat and drink a little and do their business, then they go right back to the nest. Doris didn’t like being in the chick pen. She wanted to go back to her empty nest in the nesting box. She paced and clucked and paced and clucked like a crazy lady. I thought she’d eventually give up and set on that clutch of eggs. For three days she kept it up. Finally I gave up. I let her out. I tried the other two broody hens, with no success. But another hen, an unnamed brown hen, decided she would set. So at last someone has taken on the task of hatching those eggs. The three other hens are no longer broody, my disturbing them stopped that. If I calculate right, the eggs should hatch around October 12th, a little late in the year for chicks, but with a real mother hen to take care of them, they should do okay.
It’s late now. We’ve been home just a little while and we’re tired. It’s amazing how sitting in a car for seven and a half hours can be so exhausting, but it is. We’re off to bed now. There’s a full week waiting ahead of us and it will be here soon enough.
 |
| The morning glories are still glorious. |
