To-do list for the broken hearted

We found our hen Balbina face down on the floor of the coop on Friday night, after a hellish three days of heat.

Floppy but breathing, we carried her inside and nursed her like we’ve never nursed another barely-living thing before.

Balbina was the baby of the flock. We watched her grow from scruffy halfling to comely maiden with a dashing black and white collar, bronze flank and pewter tail feathers. She was lowest in the pecking order, and loved bowling sparrows, who had landed in the chook yard to eat seeds, chasing and scattering them like pins.

“Balbina” became a household adjective for describing anything small and sweet and precious. Tiny vegetables, newborn babies, little stuffed toys… part of the nonsense vocabulary that every couple creates in their culture of two. 

For two days and three nights we did everything we could, and probably shouldn’t have, to revive our dying darling.  

An Epsom salt bath had her sitting up snapping at flies. A little ceramic dish tilted just at the right angle allowed her to take miniscule sips of fluid. We learned how to safely give electrolytes through a tube, hands quaking. She seemed to like yogurt, but couldn’t eat more than a dribble before quitting. There were bigger problems downstream. 

She rested on straw in a box on the floor of our tiny living room, eyes occasionally opening to take us in, closing again from the bottom in the way that birds’ eyes do. 

And yesterday morning when there was blood on her bedding we knew it was time to show her the sunrise and say goodbye. 

I think it was the first time I’ve witnessed Jord cry, and we cried some more when we discovered pieces of glass and a steel nut in her gizzard on autopsy, foraged treasures from our formerly-trashed garden. All of us part of the pollution pump, plastic and hardware, guilty and innocent.

So I’ve been mooning about sleep strung and puffy gilled, wondering what to do with myself. I lost a chicken. Nearly fifty people up the road lost their homes in the fires. And all of us are losing our minds reading the news. Hearts are bruised and leaden, beating heavy in our breasts, so what’s best? 

I have found much solace in gentle, practical to-dos like seed saving, fermenting and baking, weeding and watering, cleaning something grotty, mending something old and tattered in the way I couldn’t mend our battered hen. Also non-productive things like flower gazing and taking long, deep soaks in wren song. 

We planted a variegated elder tree on top of Balbina and will continue to open our foolish hearts to hens.