Three Chicken Things

Have you heard of Three Beautiful Things? Every day since May 2004, Clare has recorded three things that have given her pleasure during the day. Sometimes these are big things (like her wedding day or the arrival of baby Alec) but mostly they’re the small, everyday things that make life wonderful: the “tight fists” of roses set to bloom, the pleasant sound of snow and the magical transformation when separate ingredients turn into food.

I 3BTed every day too, for just over a year, but I got out of the habit – I do still notice things and write them in my head, just don’t commit them to paper/blog anyway. I should really get back into doing it again, because sometimes 140 characters on Twitter just isn’t enough to describe the beauty in the world.

Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning all this here and now is that I had Three Beautiful Things happen connected to me cleaning out the chicken coop this morning, and I thought I’d record them :)

1. We’ve had the chickens for 18 months now but today was the first time that I time it right to see an egg being laid. Lime is in the nest box when I first go down there so I leave her be – I sweep some leaves and retrieved Lily’s Oinky toy from the field where she’d dropped it in her running-around excitement. I peek back into the nest box around ten minutes later and see a big dry poo being pushed out – delightful – but then instantly the egg follows. It’s slippery and slick when it lands on the straw.

2. Blue hops onto the edge of the chest, clucking questions, as I dig clean shavings out of the bag. Her comb stands tall and red, her eyes are lemon and clear. Her neck feathers swoop sideways like a teenager’s fringe. Gingery-red, flecked with blonde and black.

3. Lime stands on my feet while I’m giving out pumpkin seeds so that she’s the closest to the treat source. It reminds me of how Lily sits on my feet when I’m cooking. The “please?” look on their faces is the same too.

And a bonus item:

4. As I stand at the kitchen sink washing my hands, the trees are alive with birds. A pair of chaffinches – a boy and a girl – hop about in the elder tree, the small blue tits are just tiny specks as they flit around the far away ivy bush and in comparison to them, it seems that the large tits in the cherry plum tree are truly defining gravity when they throw their big bodies into the air. Then I see another couple of birds in the holly bush that I hadn’t consciously seen before and I take in their noticeably longer tails and white mohawks so I can identify them later on the RSPB website. My hands are perhaps the cleanest they’ve ever been by the time I’ve had enough of the wildlife show.

What beautiful moments have there been in your life this weekend?

Other posts you might like:

Chicken, this is nephew; nephew, this is chicken One down – Minnie the Black Minorca chicken died overnight :( Chicken shelter from two old pallets About Buff, our buff Leghorn chicken