Owens at Home

Our remaining baby duck is recuperating nicely from a sore foot – no doubt hurt when whatever ate his brother was chasing them. He hobbles around with the chickens, but likes to sit in the pool skimmer most of all, and look out on the surface, quick to leap on any dive bombing bugs.

We are often out and about the pool these afternoons – partly because the weather is so vividly lovely – and partly because Abby’s graduation party looms close, in two weeks, and we’re decorating and planting around the pool in preparation -- hanging party lights and bringing in more gravel. I’ve also put in a small Blue Garden – that is: planted in mostly purple flowers – and have planted two huge new gardenias. They are my favorite plant on earth, but don’t do very well here in the woods; don’t know why. Too humid, I think. Get black spot. I carted in rich dirt and have buried the unfortunate chickens beneath them in hopes that they’ll take off.

If they do, I plan to put the flowers out around my house the first week in June and think of my old Mama, who used to do that when we were kids. It’s an Alabama thing – or so someone once told me: decorating your house with fresh gardenias. Patricia Anne -- the wonderful protagonist of Anne George's Southern Sister Mysteries -- does it, too, and she's an old Birmingham girl. To me, gardenias are the scent of heaven.

We have had tragedy hit the poultry this weekend. Two nights ago, the taller, more charming of our baby ducks came up missing from the chicken coop when we went to feed them. There was no sign of the body, but one of our cats (erroneously named Sweetpea) has been suspiciously nonchalant when supper time rolls around and his lack of appetite tells its own tale.

That was bad enough, but now two chickens have likewise died, and one of them is missing. Given how much the new coop costs, the eggs will now costs $200 a piece instead of merely $50.

I think this is the reason the older generaton of southerners were so ruthlessly practical: they'd grown up on the farm and had no delusions about the nature of life; knew it could be summed up in four little words: eat or be eaten.

Isabel has taken in the remaining duck to live in her bedroom with her and her pet rat Scabbers. Scabbers makes you respect the race of rats as she lives a life of conspicuous luxury, sometimes in her cage; sometimes roaming around Iz's bedroom. Isabel didn't know exactly where in her bedroom till she found a hole in the bottom of her top-of-the-line Simmons mattress and found Scabber's second home, stuffed full of left-over sandwich bags and Cheeto's and whatever other plush material she could lay her little hands on, far from the reach of the cats.

We're hoping she teaches the duck a few lessons.

My how time flies when you’re editing a novel and building a chicken coop.

The coop came about unexpectedly after the girls came upon cute baby chicks at Tractor Supply and bought ten (and two ducks for good measure.) We had an ancient old coop out back and my plan was to stick them there and be done with them – collect a few eggs by mid summer. Then Wendel stepped in and after inspecting the old coop, tore it to the ground, literally and drew up plans for a magnificent new outbuilding – chicken coop on one end, and dog house/goat barn on the other. The thing is enormous – eleven feet high on one side, and fifteen the other – so that Isabel, looking at it from the upstairs office, commented: “Mom? Who does dad think is going to collect our eggs? Shaquille O’Neal?”

So far, the structure has cost right at about seven-hundred dollars, and it isn’t finished yet. I’m thinking that we need to buy a goose when we’re done, in hopes of coming across an elusive golden egg, to pay freight for the rest of them…

I went to Mama and Daddy’s yesterday for the usual eat-a-thon. Iz had woken up with a stomach-ache and we weren't sure we could go, so I didn’t call and invite myself till just before we left for church, at about nine-thirty; told Mama we’d be down there before twelve. By the time we arrived, she had, with no more warning than that, set a Sunday dinner table which included: Roast pork, Baked whole carrots and onions, Country fried steak, Deviled eggs, Okra and tomatoes, Butterbeans, a salad of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes and onions, homemade biscuits, homemade cornbread, homemade pimento cheese and crackers, and probably a few other things I've forgotten. In around these main dishes were different kinds of home-grown peppers and pepper-sauces and plates of sliced cheese and pickles and garlic salt, so that we had to eventually move some of the food to the counter because there was no more room on the table. Mama spent half the meal apologizing that she hadn’t had time to make a dessert – offered the girls Hershey Flips and bags of Oreos and Starbursts; told me the next time we came to give her more notice so she could really cook.

Sorry to keep you hanging on my book selections, but I was out of town last weekend, and came home to a half-finished chicken coop and a huge tornado-like storm that blew down more trees than the hurricanes of last autumn. The chicken coop will soon be home to our ten chicks, who are just getting their long feathers and look positively homely. The ducks are still cute, but they’ve gotten spoiled as the good-looking often do, and whenever any of us walk by their pen in the afternoon, they set up a great squeaking-quack to try and make us take them swimming in the pool. They like to skim for bugs, and especially love it when Abby or Iz spray them with the hose while they’re swimming, which is duck-ecstasy, apparently. They can’t get enough of it.

Anyway: here is the Official First Selection of the Janis Owens Bookclub: A CHILDHOOD; THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE by Harry Crews.

As some of you know, Harry was my old writing professor at UF, and has a huge cult following around the country. This is his own memoir of his depression childhood, growing up in Bacon County Georgia, penned the year I graduated from high school and two years before I met him. It’s been re-released by a small press in trade paper (in an anthology with some of his fiction) and to my mind, the best southern memoir around – spare and hardscrabble and hilarious, all at once. My favorite part his when his families hired man wrestles with a tooth ache while a young Harry watches from window. He lunges around the room, agonizing; finally pulls the bad molar out with a pair of pliers and holds it triumphantly aloft, shouts: “Hurt now, you son of a bitch!”