Week 3: Anxieties Fading

Just when my anxieties about raising chickens were beginning to fade, my friend, Katie, came out to return a house key.  She told me about the black snakes (yes, that's plural) she saw near the garden and on the driveway last fall.  Now, I can just visualize a big black snake with a chicken egg (or, worse, a chicken) in its middle.  I immediately thought of the Little Prince's first masterpiece.  It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. The adults didn't get it. They thought it was a hat and advised him to put away his drawing.  He said that, "Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over again."  But, unlike the Little Prince, who "abandoned, at the age of six, a magnificent career as an artist," I shall not abandon, at the age of sixty-something, a magnificent opportunity to launch a career as a chicken farmer.

On the Ides of March the walls go up.
Jim and his wife, Cindy, restored two barns on
their property using only recycled materials. The
left-over materials from those barns will now become
a perfectly secure chicken coop. The floor is tongue
and groove maple.  This flooring came from an athletic
center in Topeka that failed.  New owners didn't want the
flooring, so Jim and Cindy bought it -- for a song.  

Jim is building the coop in pieces on his farm.
Here, he and Louie set the wall frames on the base
to check measurements and level.
 And talk about cost-egg-fective.