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Catalyst A spring morning, and the days are waxing longer. I slip on my crocs™ and head down the path to the coop to let the chickens loose to free range. I discover that Blanca, our white silkie Bantam hen, has head-pecked two chicks to death. Blanca was always on the verge, a distant aunt with troubled nerves wringing her hands, retreating east from the new frontier, too bewildered to scratch up seed pods and tombed grubs. Her once endearing dumbness, as in bird brained, now seems twisted. Her strange scarlet eyes glare vacant and moon cold. I do not look for a thready pulse in patches of transparency as I bundle the chicks under the spreading rhubarb leaves with their promise of toxicity. Certainly hens, though clearly they aren’t in the mammal family, come equipped with some version of maternal instinct. I scan through my very limited knowledge of bird behavior including someone’s famous experiment with imprinting ducklings or was it goslings? No matter, my mind can’t quite accept death at the hands of a mother hen’s beak. In the heavy Wisconsin air chemical reactions wait for a catalyst, and I am homesick for Virginia. The star magnolia is in full raggedy bloom with white blossoms, no foliage, and dry twiggy branches. The daffodils begin to droop, and the lilac buds are deer ravaged. My brain feels cold and dark – the moon with its black sky awaiting an atmosphere. It is April 23rd – the day after Earth Day, and with Bush as our fearless leader even the concept seems tainted and hopeless. The comforting ritual of boiling well water, filling the unbleached filter with dark coffee grounds and watching the water steam them dark and fragrant, doesn’t provide its usual comfort. The coffee tastes off, with a strange chemical flavor and I shiver while I wrap my hands around the mug. Where is Darwin and his treatise on survival? I stare across the way as new green corn stalks thrust up through a pool of hundred year flood water. Later, cranes pluck them up in pre-ordained patterns driven by Avogadro’s number. I pull heavy wet sheets out of the washer, dump them into a wicker basket, and lug them out to the clothesline. The clean soapy smell of the linen calms me. As I pin sheets to the line, I watch Noah, my youngest son, scooping rainwater from the tire swing. He mixes the muddy water in a bucket with blades of new grass, dandelion blooms and pea gravel from the driveway. He offers me a taste of his spring soup, and I manage to pull myself out of my brain funk long enough to marvel over his concoction. I will never know how much of these uninvited gray spells I should blame on heredity, hormones or a combination of random events. I am left with this: I fully realize that I have hundreds of things to be exponentially thankful for at any given moment, and yet at times I am almost numb in this heavy slow aura of drab. I think about my dad and paternal grandpa with their history of depression so severe they received the maximum number of ECT treatments. I obsess over all the Plath biographies, Sylvia trying to outrun all her hidden mind demons. She is always so busy, her hands blessing the black future with red painted hearts. She adorns the scrubbed hive with bluebirds and flowers to ward off all the flesh wounds from a father too soon dead. There’s the haunting image of Sylvia laying out bread and milk within the reach of Nickolas and Frieda. How can any mother not shudder with the realization that even maternal love and the complicated package of biology could not save her? Will there always be some sort of social stigma against mental illness? The brain with its hemispheres and synapses is too hidden and contained behind the vault of a bony skull. We can’t even interpret our dreams like Daniel did for the pharaoh in some Old Testament book. There are all the convoluted questions around nature and nurture, the maddening impact from the variable called hormones. I laugh when I think about a former fourth grade student after viewing the mandatory human growth and development series who wrote on her anonymous question slip: “What are horror mones?” Who can hope to explain mood swings, depression, the rush of love a mother gets when a nurse hands her that first blanketed bundle? We move through the days and hope for small glimmers of understanding while we pack lunches, muck out hen houses, and fold laundry by the basketsful.
Jenna Rindo lives with her husband and blended family of five children in rural Pickett, Wisconsin. They have a small flock of Shetland sheep and also raise 15- 20 Bantam chickens. Jenna worked as a pediatric registered nurse for seven years, and now teaches English as a second language. Her poems have appeared in various journals including: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Kalliope, Free Verse and online at eclectica magazine and Iris magazine.
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