‘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.