‘When will they be ripe?’ Silky Josephine asks of the blackberries as we pass the bramble on our walk, the stickered cane already thick with little green nubs. 
     Having taken an interest in baking, Silky is anxious to try her hand at cobbler. 
  She’s collected recipes. Dozens. Sorted them into categories of most and least buttery. And then from the most buttery recipes, sorted out those that had the best combination of goo and crunch ...that would require a bowl for eating, and most appreciate a spoon of ice cream, or even two. 
    She seems to have settled on an old Irish recipe that involves not only a great deal of butter, but also brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and the use of an iron skillet for baking. 
     ‘Another two weeks,’ I tell her. 
     'I can’t wait,’ Josie says. 
     And quite honestly ...neither can I.

             

If a squirrel were to hang from a branch by its hind feet ...which, as you might know, is not an uncommon pastime among squirrels ... and stretch to its fullest, this would be approximately ...and rather suspiciously, I might add ...the length of the cords that we found remaining in the Bumblebee tree. The cords to which, only yesterday, nearly a dozen bird feeders had been attached.

rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.

‘Stop it, P!’ I hear Josie say, ‘I’m trying to concentrate.’
     
     Browsing the library for her next bedtime story, Silky Josephine discovered two evenings ago, an old paperback, recently added to the newly installed shelves. 
     ‘It smells like Science,’ she said, when I removed the book for her closer examination and approval. 
     Yellow-edged and brittling, its pages did indeed give off the moist, metallic scent of an often-used laboratory, of an experiment deep in its many-beakered and burbling process.
     Moving Mountains, the book was called. And on its cover ...beneath one of Sir James Fraser’s many mesmerizing spirals ...was printed the claim that inside one would find the keys to unlock their mind’s natural telekinetic powers. 
     ‘What are telekinetic powers?’ Josie asked. 
     ‘Well,’ I say, ‘telekinesis, or telekinetic power, is the ability to move an object without touching it. With your mind. Mostly.’ 
     Silky’s eyes widen, ‘Ohhhh,’ she says, ‘This book then. Let’s read this one.’ 
      And so we do. 
     Which is why Silky Josephine has been on the floor this morning, still as a stone for nearly twenty minutes now, bright eyes intent on one of her more rollable toys, a cat-eye marble, silent, but for her occasional snip at ‘P’ ...Peter Pan ...who has only ever slept with any great display of determination, and lunges and yaps, ‘Move!’ at the marble every half minute or so. 
     ‘Breakfast?’ I suggest, and a smile spreads across Silky Josephine’s deeply concentrated face. 
     ‘I knew you were going to say that,’ she says. ‘I just knew it.’ 

Josie jumped. Peter Pan jumped. And Harley ...Well, Harley may have jumped. It’s difficult to tell with his being so very near to the ground and all, especially when you yourself have jumped almost entirely out your skin. 
     But we’ll say that the four of us jumped in unison—albeit in our varied heights—startled by a patch of Buttercups that exploded in our approach, took wing, and made for wood’s edge, where, like a fistful of golden coins, strewn and spin glimmering, end over end, the flowers vanished into the thick of underbrush and briars there. 
     I know for certain that the four of us stood then for quite some time, blinking, uncertain of what we had seen. 
     Blinking ...until bird by bird, the Goldfinches appeared at the low tips of Dogwood boughs and blackberry cane, to preen and wait our passing their sweet patch of Buttercups, spring-laden with seed.

‘Daisy has a feather!’ I hear Silky Josephine say. 
     She has raced ahead to the brooder box where we were bound with fresh feed and water for the chicks, and is looking inside. 
     ‘There not red though,’ she informs me, as I come to stand beside her, ‘or even orange.’ 
     And sure enough, through the fluff of little yellow Daisy’s wings, feathers have begun to sprout. And just as Josie has said, not a hint of red or orange. More black than anything. 
     ‘Well,’ I say, ‘Our little Comet is full of surprises, isn’t she?’ 
     Silky nods. 
     ‘What kind of chicken is she now?’ she asks. 
     ‘She’s a mutt, Josephine,' I tell her, 'like you and me and Peter Pan and Harley. A little bit of this. A little bit of that. Nothing in particular. Just a chicken.’ 
     ‘Is that a good kind of chicken to be?’ Silky asks, concerned, 'A Just-a-Chicken chicken?' 
     ‘It is,’ I tell her, ‘It’s the best kind of chicken to be.’ 

There are six dog beds ...three indoor, three out. The big bed ...mine. The cushioned Adirondack chairs, with their armrests at the perfect height for his chin. A quilt in the shop, and sometimes even the bench seat of the truck. 
     But of all the places that Harley has to sleep, with his belly up and his ears flopped, he loves most a spot beneath the old sugar maple out front, where in the morning, sunshine pours through a break in the spring-greened leaves and warms for him a bed of new and downy grass, strategically positioned, so that with only one eye opened he is keenly aware of every trunk down which a squirrel might descend, despite the unlikelihood of his ever rising to give chase.

‘How much longer until Christmas?’ an expectant Silky Josephine asks me the other morning before breakfast. 

     ‘Well,’ I said, having to do some quick math to give her an answer, ‘seven months, I think. A little more.’ 

     This was clearly not the answer that Silky wanted to hear. Her ears drop, her eyes, her head. Everything that was pert—which is everything with Silky—slumped with a rare unhappiness. 

     ‘Oh,’ Silky said, and I know that she was sad, because she left it at that, no more questions, which is not like Silky at all, just a lengthy sigh, and then she turned back to the room from which she came. 

      ‘Why?’ I asked her. 

    ‘I wanted pancakes.’ Silky told me, ‘With peanut butter. And I thought if it was close to being Christmas, I would wish for them.’ 

     Silky sighed again, long and sadly. ‘But it’s not,’ she said. ‘Christmas is not close at all.’ 

     ‘There are other things you can make a wish on, Silky,’ I told her. 

     One ear raised, a cinnamon eyebrow. 

     ‘What other things?’ Silky asks. 

     ‘Well,’ I say, ‘Stars and rainbows, wishing bones and wishing wells, ladybirds, dandelions and even feathers.’ 

     ‘Feathers?’ 

     ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Feathers. Find one. Stick it in the ground. Walk around it making your wish, for pancakes or whatever, and if the feather doesn’t fall, your wish will come true.’ 

     Perk, perk, perk, up Silky Josephine lights. 

     ‘Ohhhh,’ she says. ‘How much longer until we go on our walk?’ 

     ‘Not long my sweet girl,’ I tell her, ‘not long at all.’

‘Has she ever read one of our letters?’ Silky Josephine asks of the letters that I write to you, which, apparently, are no longer only from me, but have become ‘our letters’, and are from Silky Josephine and Peter Pan and Harley as well. 
     ‘Not that I know of,’ I tell her. 
     Silky weighs this reply for a moment and then for another moment is distracted by the dry flutterings of gallinipper that has somehow managed to get into the house, but finally she asks, ‘Do you think that she ever will?’ 
     ‘I doubt it very much, Josie,’ I tell her.
     Again with the weighing, but with a slight look of confusion added this time, a crinkling of the cinnamon patches Silky wears as eyebrows. 
     ‘Then why send them to her?’ she asks. 
      I smile. 
     More than once have I asked myself this very question, and each time been given the same answer in reply ...a book from my shelves. 
     ‘Have I ever read to you ‘The Magician’s Elephant’?' I ask Silky Josephine. 
     She shakes her head no. 
     ‘Well, let’s do that tonight why don't we. See if it doesn’t help to answer your question.’

‘I’ll call her Daisy,’ Silky Josephine says. ‘That’s a good yellow name. Like Sunshine, only a flower.’ 
     While Josie was able to sniff the eggs we put into our incubator, and before they hatched, determine whether they would be a boy or girl, so that she could name them properly, she was unable to sniff through the shell what color the chicks would be. 
     I had told her that they all should be black, as they were Plymouth Barred Rock chickens, and that eventually, their fluff would be replaced with gray and white speckled feathers. 
     I was right about seven of the eight that hatched. But one, the eighth, was yellow. A little girl. Bright and buttery. 
     While she was still an egg, Silky had named the chick Gretchen, as it sounded to her like a good, gray name. There was an Ashley too, a Pepper, and of course, a little rooster she named Foghorn. But seeing the little chick now, hatched out and yellow as a sunbeam, Silky just didn’t think Gretchen fit. 
     ‘She’s a Comet, Josephine,’ I told her of the chick, thinking it best to throw a small wrench into the naming process now in hopes of avoiding a much larger explanation later. ‘She’s not going to be yellow forever.’ 
     ‘A Comet?’ Silky says, her eyes widening with the sound of it. ‘What color will she be?’ 
     ‘Kind of red. Kind of orange,’ I tell her. 'Like a comet, I suppose.'
     Silky stared for a moment at the little chick. She pressed her nose against its fluff and took in a deep breath of its scent. 
    ‘I think when she’s a Comet on the outside,’ Silky Josephine said finally, ‘she’ll still be Daisy enough on the inside.’ 
     And so it was, that with a sniff, the egg named Gretchen became our little Comet, named Daisy.




  

‘Peter Pan thinks it’s magic,’ Silky Josephine says of a particularly wondrous stone they have found on our walk. ‘But I don’t believe it.’ 
     ‘Why not?’ I ask her, turning the stone over in my palm. 
    River-rounded, it’s the color of caramel and cream, smooth and slightly egg-shaped, with an odd translucence that makes it seem to glow, makes me wonder if I should hold it to my ear in some quieter place and listen, deeply, for a voice perhaps, a song. 
     ‘Because it doesn’t do anything,’ Silky replies. ‘It doesn’t fly. It doesn’t float. Nothing.’ 
     ‘Well,’ I say, ‘It’s a tricky business, to get a Magical Thing to do the magical things that it does,’ and I hold the stone up to the Sun, where its caramel glow fills red with the setting.
     ‘How magical do you think that sunsets would be', I ask, 'if the Sun were to be thrown into a roadbed and driven over, day after day, all of its efforts unnoticed?’ 
     Peter Pan and Silky Josephine love both sunrises and sunsets tremendously and look horribly saddened by the thought of them being driven over and forgotten in the gravel of some lonely road. Too saddened to speak. 
     ‘Exactly,’ I say, handing Peter Pan back the stone. 
    ‘Watch Silky. Give it a little attention and see how its magic grows.’

‘Can I help?’ Silky Josephine asks. 
    Eighteen days are up, and it’s time to remove our incubating eggs from the cradles of their mechanical turner. 
     We’ll add a dash of water to the incubator and replace them in a cluster, points down, as near to nest-like as possible. 
     Silky can be very gentle when it comes to picking things up, but putting things down has always been another issue entirely. 
    ‘How about you make sure that I have the pointiest ends facing downward,’ I tell her. ‘It’s hard for me to tell which is which, and it’s very important that we be right about it.’ 
      And it is. 
     And like a good mother ...not a hen, but a good mother ...Silky Josephine nudges and nuzzles her babies until they are cozy close, their points all perfectly facing downward, ready to hatch.

It’s pointless, trying to count the pale green and peach flowers that have bloomed on the Bumblebee Tree. Pointless too, trying to count the bees, who, one or sometimes two at a time, are at work on the flowers, collecting all that is sweet at their centers. 
     It’s best to just say there are thousands upon thousands, take hold of a low branch, swing up and climb through the middle, high, perch among the flowers and the bees, close your eyes and imagine you are in a Keeper’s skep, perhaps the Queen, and all around you the drone of your hive, your Kingdom, deafening, alive and busy. 

                                                        

‘Eleven more days,’ Silky Josephine says, peering through the incubator’s little window at the eggs we have placed there to hatch. One dozen. Eleven brown and one green. 
     Silky has them all named. 
    ‘How do you know which are boys and which are girls?’ I asked her, when she was in the process of dubbing the twelve warmed eggs. 
     ‘I sniff them,’ she said. ‘How else do you know a boy from a girl?’ 
    And I could do nothing but smile, and say, ‘I love you, Josephine,’ and kiss the top of her silky black head, because how else, really, can a question like that be answered.

‘Would you look at her,’ Priscilla says of Silky Josephine. ‘Thin as a whip.’ 
     Last year, if you recall, Silky had a bit of a growth spurt. Not upwards or lengthwise, but roundwise—her girth. 
     We passed it off as baby fat for a while and then tried to put the blame on an imbalance, but it wound up being the hand that fed her who was responsible, going a little heavy on the treats and helpings. 
     Silky Josephine is a stocky girl. Other than her legs and tail, no part of her anatomy will ever be ‘thin as a whip’, as Priscilla said, but there’s a curve to her belly now that matches the ‘healthy dog’ images at her doctor’s office, and I thank Priscilla for noticing. 
     ‘Is the box okay?’ I ask her as she swoops by again. 
   Silky’s size was not the only thing that changed in Priscilla’s absence. The patio where she has always nested was screened in over the winter. I built a box beneath the patio’s eaves, safe from wind and rain, but without Priscilla there to consult, was really only able to guess at what might meet her nesting needs. 
     ‘Perfect,’ she says in a hover. ‘We’re mudding it now.’ 
     And off like a bullet she flies to meet Carl, already in the air above the meadow green. 

Blink, blink, blink, go little Peter Pan’s eyes whenever we come to the door ...squinty, wincey, blinks ...because Peter Pan is always second in line, second behind Silky Josephine and her whip of a tail going swishety, swish, swish, swash.

‘Why is there a hole in the bottom of this tree,’ Silky Josephine asks. 
     Three tall pines stand between our house and the pasture, the only pines for miles. The hole Silky is asking about is more of a tunnel at the base of the centermost and tallest of the three trees, large enough for at least the back half of her to pass through, if she shimmied. 
     ‘Lightning,’ I tell her, and Silky’s eyes widen. 
     ‘When?’ she asks. 
     ‘On an Easter Sunday, just like today, a long time ago,’ I reply. 
     And I tell her of that first Easter Sunday on the Farm, of how the storm came and the lightning struck the pines, up one and down the others, and how it chased into the house and struck the oven where the Easter ham was cooking, and how my ears rang for days with the crash of it, and how everyone said the trees would soon die and should be cut down, and how I couldn’t cut them down, and they didn’t die, and how on Easter Sundays I won’t use the oven and am a little more nervous than usual, because it seems there is always a storm then. 
     ‘Always?’ Silky asks, and in the distance, we hear the low rumble of thunder. 
     ‘Always,’ I say.




  

‘They’re back early,’ I hear Agatha say behind me. 

     She is perched in the lilac, a rare moment of still, her rust feathers and speckled underbelly oddly suited to the lavender and hunter green. 

     ‘I was thinking that very same thing,’ I say, and Agatha’s amber eye gleams with smile. She prides herself in being first to voice a thought. 

     Priscilla and Carl have returned. My guess would be three weeks earlier than last year. Maybe the flying was good. Maybe they received word of our mild winter. I’ll ask later when they’ve settled in. 

     Agatha and I watch them dart and titter over the new cut pasture, fresh as if they’d flown in from the farm down the road and not from who knows how many hundreds of miles away. 

     ‘You’d think they’d want to rest a bit after coming all that way,’ Agatha says.

     And I nod to let her know she has beat me to the punch again ...said exactly what was on my mind ...and in the lilac I know her eyes are diamonds.

A three-day stretch of warmth and it’s cold again this morning. 
     ‘Which Winter is this?’ Silky Josephine asks, shivering. 
     We have five little Winters here after Winter. Spring cold snaps, four of which magically correlate with the blooming of the Redbuds, the Dogwoods, the Locust trees and the Blackberries. In that order. 
     The fifth, there were no blossoms for, and so was called, Wooly Britches, or just plain Wooly, as you will need something woolen and warm to wear, which hopefully you haven’t already stowed away. 
     The Redbuds, Silky’s favorite because they are pinkish, have already blossomed, as have the Dogwoods, again Silky’s favorite for obvious reasons. 
     ‘It’s Locust Winter,’ I tell her, which sadly we don’t have many of, Black Locust, for their bushels upon bushels of glorious white blossoms produce a scent that should not be reduced by words, but rather drawn in deeply and held near to the heart, for you will recognize it again at Heaven’s own gates. 
     ‘Locust Winter,’ Silky repeats, for she is committing in their proper order the five little Winters after Winter to memory. 
     ‘Yes’, I tell her. ‘Black Locust. There’s a grove down the road. We’ll go there later, if you’d like, when the sun has warmed the flowers.’ 
     And those eyes, so wide and so bright, I don’t need for her to answer.

Silky Josephine, Peter Pan, Harley and I are out on the High Hill, watching the much-talked-about, but not at all pink full moon in snatches through dark and racing clouds. 
     ‘Why is it called a Pink Moon, if it’s not really pink?’ Silky asks.
     She's been dreadfully concerned lately with the science and facts and general workings of things, big and small. 
     ‘It was named the Pink Moon a long time ago,' I tell Silky, 'after a pink flower that blooms this time of year, a phlox, Subulata. We can look it up in your flower book later, if you’d like.’ 
    Silky nods. And for a while we watch the full moon in silence until, ‘Pink would have been nice though,’ she says. ‘I like pink.’

'I think I'm allergic to sunshine,' Silky Josephine tells me this morning. 'Peter Pan is too,' she says, and Pete nods vigorously, his little piglet ears flapping like little piglet wings ...winglets.  

'How's that?' I ask, setting their breakfast down in front of them. 

'It makes us sleepy,' Silky explains. 

I nod. 'A clear sign,' I say. 'You're definitely allergic to sunshine.' 

Silky, possibly not expecting me to so readily agree with her, looks worried, but not nearly as worried as Peter Pan, who looks absolutely stricken with fret. 

'Is there a cure?' Silky asks. 

'There is,' I say, and Silky sighs with relief. Peter Pan, however, has had a cure or two that was, if not, as unbearable as the predicament, nearly so, and has shifted his worry in that direction, shaking now visibly, his breakfast untouched. 

'What is it?' Silky asks, 'The cure?' 

'Sunshine,' I tell her, because it's true. 'The only cure for a sunshine allergy, is more sunshine,' I say, 'Lay in it, roll in it, run in it, play in it. You'll be fine in no time at all.' 

And even Peter Pan, worrisome as he is, likes the sound of this.           

   

‘My tummy hurts,’ Silk Josephine tells me this morning.

‘Mmm hmm,’ I say. ‘I bet it does.’ 

‘Why?’ She moans. 

‘Remember what you ate last night on our walk?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘The cat poop?’ 

Silky doesn’t recall. 

‘How about the rabbit poop, the deer poop or the raccoon’s?’ I ask. 

‘No’ Silk says, shaking her head. ‘I don’t remember.’ 

‘Well your tummy does,’ I say, and from somewhere inside of Silky there comes a rumble and then a squeak. 

Silky groans. 

‘I’ll get you some rice. But tonight, how about we pass on the trail snacks. Okay?’ 

‘Okay,' she says. 'Will you help me to remember though?’

‘I will, Josie. I will.’ 

We are at  home, as many are, and I noted while cleaning that if you have low windows—which we do—and have ever considered accumulating dogs—which we did—I’d advise that your accumulation be of a similar stature—which ours isn’t—so as to concentrate the inevitable nose prints on your low windows, if not to a single pane, then at least to roughly the same elevation.

Stay well. 

Isn't it wonderful how beneath every white duck there are two gloriously orange feet.