peep

Oh, how I love spring.

How can you not? I don't care where you live, spring looks like the earth yawning and stretching its arms. It smells like hope, and new beginnings, and the promise of soon-to-be-cut grass. It tastes like a long-awaited picnic. It feels like bright yellow fluff. It sounds like the peep of two-legged babies.

That's what's filling my ears right now ... the sound of chicks trying out their teeny vocal chords. Yesterday was "chick day" at the local co-op. Dave and I trotted down there and picked up a half-dozen Golden Sex Link chicks. Supposedly, they've been bred to only produce females, but I don't quite follow the logic (or feasibility) of that. All I know is that they're adorable ... and very noisy.

We tried hooking them up with an adoptive Banty mother, but the two hens we tried didn't cooperate much. Both ignored the chicks huddling in one back corner of Larry's outgrown dog carrier and tried to beat their way out by flying repeatedly into the wire mesh. We took pity on both and let them go, but that left the dilemma of how to keep those six chicks alive through the night. The only reasonable thing to do was to invite them up to the house.

When we first brought them inside, they shivered together in that same back corner. But Dave's crafty. He rigged up a 100-watt bulb and shone it down on the front half of the wood chips. In two seconds flat, those chicks had tippy-toed their collective mass over to the lit side, and basked in that 100-watt delight.

There's a lesson there. We're good together, we humans. Scrunched up tight, we might even eke out a bit of shared body heat. But there's nothing like gathering together under the Light. His warmth goes straight to the bones, perks us up, and makes all our fluff stand on end.

I reached in to snap a close-up of the noisy brood, and as soon as I came at them with that camera, they turned, retreated to the dark side, and gave me the cold shoulder.

But when I left, they went right back to their sun-bathing.