mother to mother to mother

Mother Nature is amazing to me.

Truly.

I always imagine Mother Nature as a beautiful spiritual, ethereal being. A wispy, wise, and peaceful presence.

Living on a farm we see Mother Nature's work daily. It has to be her. Who else would make the fruit trees bloom at just the right time in the spring? Who else would wake the sleeping daffodils under ground and tell them to come forward and announce themselves?

Who else would fill Bessie, our true Mother Hen, with the consuming "broody" urge to set on a clutch of eggs? Mother Nature has set a farm Mother to work. The work of unrelenting patience. Setting herself still and quiet for 21 days on a clutch of fertile eggs borrowed from the farm next door.

She's done it before, so we figured she could do it again. But things didn't go as planned for Bessie. After two weeks she became confused one night when returning to her nest after a short snack and leg stretch... She returned to the wrong nesting box. The eggs lay cold all night.

With a new batch of eggs, we start the count down again, as Bessie will not be deterred. Her instincts are too strong. After two more weeks, the mix up happens again.

So, we've learned so far that Bessie isn't the smartest chick on the farm, but she is possibly the most devoted. She has become weak and thin. She has lost all of her feathers on her underside. And she is falling victim to the Hen House bullies as they pick at her. Yet she waits...

In a panic to help her we try to "break" her mood. We remove her eggs and remove her from the nesting box over and over again. We lock her out only to have her wait at the door to have her race in when it's opened to find her nest. It was heartbreaking. Mother Nature's powerful instincts had consumed this Mother Hen.

As a mother myself, I couldn't watch it anymore... her confusion, her devotion, her will. So, RT and I run to the feed store, buy 5 four-day-old chicks, and wait until well after dark. Then, in the late night moonlight, with a chick in each of our hands, we all creep into the chicken coop, I lift Bessie as she sleeps, and stuff the 5 chicks underneath her.

It was the most amazing sight to see her the next morning clucking and fussing over these chicks as they scampered out from under her wings and then back under cover of their Mother. No question in her little mind that these are her babies.

A Mother of 5.

She had done her job. She had waited patiently, and they had come. It didn't matter that they had come by way of a human mother's empathy, or a spiritual mother's instinct. They had come indeed.