‘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.