‘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.