Wednesday was Ellis’s second birthday and, like most mornings, the day started with his yelling “Da-deee” at about 5:20 as I was on my first cup of coffee. And, like most mornings, he settled back down. That was good; I had a column to write before the girls were supposed to get Ma  up for school.

    History is destiny or so they say. Like both Lisa’s parents and my parents before us, we have three children. The house we live in seemed big enough when I was a child here, but now I spend many weekends sorting toys and kids’ clothing, trying to figure out what to take to the dump, what to save, and what to give away.

    Ellis already has shirts, shorts, pants, and shoes to last him through about third grade. While engaged in a never-ending battle to make order out of the chaos that is our basement, I built a high wall of bulging bags of clothes people have given us. As perhaps the last of our friends to have a baby, we are sort of at the end of the line as far as this goes.

    For the girls, now 7 and 10, the great hand-me-down stream has begun to dry up, but they are at its headwaters now. Bags of the things they no longer fit into or can’t abide have flown out far and wide.

    I enjoy the puzzle of assembling stuff to give to different children to appeal to their nascent aesthetics. Ravenel gets the blue and navy frocks, simple one-color sweaters; Lola gets the dresses with frills, pinks, busy prints. Other things go to a woman we know who is taking care of a granddaughter, still more to charity.

    Much of the girls’ wear has come from the Neuberts, a Sagaponack family whose fast-growing children have been a boon to our slightly more diminutive kids. The mom, Adeline, says she enjoys it that the things she gives us are in turn passed to others. The other day when she came by the office with some bags of outerwear that no longer fit her kids, she said she sometimes will be out somewhere and see a child wearing something she thinks she recognizes.

    No doubt when Ellis wakes up today and Lisa or I put him in an outfit for his birthday, something he will wear will have once belonged to another child. He won’t care, and neither will I.

   Maybe I decided to take part in a recent chain letter — by e-mail, of course — because it came from a cousin a couple of times removed, or maybe I’m just a recipe hound. I’ve got manila folders full of them that date back 30 years or more.

    The chain letter came with a suggestion that participants forward to friends a recipe they know so well they don’t have to look it up. The idea being to make it easy and keep the chain flowing. The instructions didn’t say the recipe had to be original, so I contributed one of our own Laura Donnelly’s easiest recipes, putting it in my own words and changing its name to Lazy Chicken. All you do is shake up a whole bird of, say, three pounds in a bag with a cup of Bisquick, take it out, put it in a heavy iron skillet, and bake it in a 450-degree oven for an hour.

    I didn’t come up with the 20 people I was supposed to send a recipe to, and several friends politely declined to participate. But, still, numerous recipes have been arriving in my inbox, and I have been fascinated by the fact that most of them come from strangers — who clearly inhabit entirely different worlds, culinarily speaking. Only two of the batch I received came from people I actually know.

    Rather than simple, two of the recipes that came my way were for bread! One sender called his pumpernickel rye bread easy to make, if time consuming. The other was a white soda bread that didn’t sound hard, although I’m not, well, ready to start baking bread. I might, however, try the baked chicken with cider, apples, applejack, ginger, cinnamon, and brown sugar that came from an East Hampton couple.

    One recipe threw me for a loop. Taco Soup called for a particular commercial chili mix and a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes. I hadn’t heard of Ro-Tel products, but have since been informed that they are a staple of the advertising pages of magazines like Ladies Home Journal. “My wife and I used this recipe often when our three athlete sons were in high school,” the sender noted.

    Because one of the people on my chain list works at The Star, I also got to check out the recipes she received. She was more diligent than I, and got more back. One came from England. Another was a holdover from the dark ages of the ’40s and ’50s: a chicken casserole made with frozen chopped broccoli and two cans of cream of chicken soup. This dish might actually be pleasant, old-fashioned comfort food, except that it also called for cheddar cheese and curry powder, and I am not convinced. But I might try a third, pork roast with dried apricots and prunes.

    One of my colleague’s responses took the cake — literally. Parsonage Cake was said to have originated with a minister’s wife who “swore she could see a parishioner at the end of the block and have [the] cake ready to serve by the time the doorbell rang.” Now that’s a keeper.   

Parsonage Cake

Ingredients

2 Tbsp. good cocoa

3/4 cup flour

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/8 tsp. salt

1 egg

1/4 cup shortening, melted (or use half butter, half Crisco)

1/2 cup cold water

1/2 tsp. vanilla

Method:

     Mix everything together at once. Pour into 8-inch greased and floured pan. Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.

   Cat lovers, maybe more so than dog lovers, enjoy having more than one cat at any given time. I am one of those cat lovers. One is just not enough.

    Sometimes the Other cat presents him or herself with no effort on your part at all.

    Years ago in New York, the first cat I had as an adult was delivered to me at my first apartment. My friend Carol thought a first apartment should have a cat, so she answered an ad for kittens in The Village Voice and “Archie” (gray tabby) arrived at my door. That was in 1968. I had Archie until 1982, when I was a new bride.

    Archie needed a friend when I moved to a larger apartment in 1969, so I went to a cattery (I know, a bad thing to do) and got my first Maine coon cat. Her name was Motley (brown tabby) and she had pushed her way toward me on a table full of cats. (Reader, she wanted me.) She became the Other cat.

    During the ’70s in Manhattan, living in a rent-controlled apartment on upper Central Park West, I rode the AA and CC trains to get to work. For three consecutive years I found teenage kittens on the subway platform at 103rd Street. So I (and my then boyfriend) acquired Rita (dark tortoiseshell) and Theo (mostly brown tabby with white belly) and happily found a home for the third foundling.

    In four years Archie had been joined by three other cats. Even I had never bargained on four cats. That boyfriend made me promise, please, not to find or let myself be found by any more. I did not and they did not. We stayed happily for many years until the boyfriend, rather than the cat, strayed and I moved farther downtown.

    Rita and Motley kept my mother company in Orient when I moved from that rent-controlled apartment to a half-floor in a tiny brownstone in the Village (not large enough for four cats and one person). Archie and Theo, who were willing to travel by car, stayed with me in the city and both got married to my husband, John, two years later.

    When Archie went to cat heaven, Theo needed a pal and once again I went the breeder route for another Maine coon cat, Grace. Again, she picked me from a pile of pale calico teenagers. Theo stopped being Other and Grace got that title.

    Grace lived a happy life with Theo and traveled back and forth from our midtown apartment to East Hampton every weekend.

    After Theo went to the great cat hunting ground we just didn’t get another cat to keep Grace company. And no stray or foundling presented itself either. In matters of cat, sometimes you have to leave things to kismet.

    Grace retired to East Hampton when my husband retired and did not miss the weekly commute. She joined her pals in kitty heaven after 15 years of Coon catness.

    We were catless for about six months. But my retired husband (I was still working in New York and going back and forth on weekends) needed a kitty. All the cats that had shared my world to this point had been kind of brown and murky in coloration. In 1999 we got yet another Maine coon, a kitten we called Jack. Readers of this newspaper may have seen pictures of Jack: a bright orange tabby. He was a solo cat for about a year while I organized retiring from my job of 32 years, selling our apartment, and joining my husband and Jack in East Hampton full time.

    Our 624-square-foot house was just not big enough for two adults and a very big kitten. We set about renovating our small house. During the renovations we (three) lived first in a rental and then in a grace-and-favor set of rooms in the house of our generous friend Marjorie. Jack grew to be a very big cat.

    Our house was finished after eight months and we figured that Jack needed a friend. While photographing a pet fair held by Elsa’s Ark, I met Dilly (torti-calico, semi-longhair). She picked me by reaching through the grid of the cage and taking a swat at the lens cap hanging from my camera. She was not a kitten, which was a good thing since Jack was so big. So Dilly became the Other to Jack. And they lived happily together until just recently.

    Sadly Jack went to kitty heaven at age 12 (not really old enough, but he wanted to go).

    Losing a pet is very, very difficult for any family and also for the family pets.

    Dilly seemed glum.

    When we were comfortable I set off to interview another Other. First I looked on the shelter Web sites, read the ages, and looked at the photos of the cats and kittens. I guess this is like online dating. I looked at Elsa’s Ark and on the North Fork, just to be fair. The old let-the-cat-pick-you thing kicked in. We did not want to burden the 10-year-old Dilly with an insane kitten. A young adult would do just fine, thank you. We figured any cat from the cat rooms at a shelter would know how to cope with another cat. But face-to-face is where love matches happen.

    I went off to ARF with a list in hand of possible kitty candidates. Sitting in a room of milling cats is actually my idea of heaven — all that purring, all those tails. After swooning with joy, I had to focus, identify the possibles, and see if they were interested in me. So many, and so cute. I did a little culling from my list. Some were asleep and I never really got to interview them, Some ignored me. One didn’t like being picked up. The folks at ARF know their cats and steered me away from some alpha males who would not work with my Dilly’s personality. This was not as easy as it had been with Dilly, to be sure! I went home catless but determined.

    The next visit my husband would be with me to see if any kitty fell in love with both of us or got a crush on him. Seriously, this is like blind dates. You sit on the floor or chair and hope that the one you liked in the photo will pay some attention to you. Isn’t it typical that the one you thought you would have a crush on ignores you. But then, over there, that’s the one who looked me in the eye the first visit (and I really wasn’t looking for yet another calico) . . . but then she rolled over, and rolled over again. And then we heard her name, “Lois.”

    So that was that. It actually took a few more visits just to be sure, but each time there was Lois, looking us in the face, rolling over and letting her tummy be scratched.

    Lois and Dilly are still working it out, but we are sure they will. We are wondering if Dilly will learn Lois’s hilarious trick of paddling her water in the water dish and drinking from her foot. It is really nice to have another Other.

—

    Durell Godfrey is The Star’s contributing photographer.

   How is the civilized world going to survive without books you can hold in your hand?

    Will a subgroup of educated elite stick with bound paper copies, even though the same texts are available electronically?

    I made a terrible face when someone (who shall be nameless) gave me a Kindle for my birthday last fall. It took months, and a trip by plane, before I gave it a try. Now, having read two books and a bit of The New York  Times on my Kindle, I remain reluctant to become a true convert.

    I’ve always cherished the many books, of various vintages and for children as well as adults, that abound in my house. I can’t imagine the living room without the shelves full of books on either side of the fireplace; in my opinion, they also make the room look pretty.  For the most part, our books are arranged by happenstance, or just dropped on the shelves helter-skelter. I’m not one of these people who treat each volume as a precious object. I’ve been known to dog-ear.

    So why do I hold on to them?

    When I was in college, a friend and I got excited when — in a used-books store we frequented — we came upon a handsome, dark-green set of 24 books by Honoré de Balzac. I can’t remember why we were so enthralled by Balzac at the time. It’s possible that we were more motivated by the idea of being the sorts of intellectual, worldly young women who own things like that. Neither of us had enough money to buy the set,  so we decided to split the cost . . . and the books. We promised each other to exchange them some day. Of course, we never did.

     I read two Balzac novels, Le Pere Goriot and La Cousine Bette, before graduating. At least I think I did. But I never read even one more novel by Balzac afterward. My half of the set decorates the top shelf of the bookcase to the left of the fireplace. I wonder if she kept hers?

    Some people I know have impressive libraries, reflections of their intellects and taste. I’ve admired them (the people and the libraries), but it may be that personal libraries of this kind are doomed. If everything you could possibly want to read is, or will be, available with one or two clicks and in a few seconds, book collections will surely turn into little more than antiques, accumulated to gratify the desire for collection. Or investments, like artwork, perhaps.

    The long, drawn-out controversy over the planned new children’s wing at the East Hampton Library seems to be over.  I’ve supported the wing, even though the building, and the library’s parking lot, are adjacent to my house. Given that books are becoming virtual — that children are learning to manipulate computers and other electronic devices in elementary school or even kindergarten — libraries with good children’s rooms seem more and more important. Who would want their child to grow up without knowing the touch, and the smell, of a favorite old book?

   It’s Valentine’s Day as I am asked to write this “Relay,” and as I listen to “That’s the Way Love Goes” by Janet Jackson on my “love” playlist, chosen for inspiration, I assume today will be standard: Single female goes through the day trying not to be repulsed by those who get excited about a silly holiday.

    No, I am not bitter about not being in a serious relationship at the moment.  Even when I was, for example, when I was married for 13 years, I never comprehended the day. Why do people need a day to show each other how they feel and go out to dinner? I guess I was always fortunate to be involved with men with whom expressions of love and dinners out were a fairly regular event, without a calendar or Hallmark telling us how and when.

    I will admit the holiday was fun when I was little. My dad would place four small heart-shaped boxes of chocolate on the dining room table, in front of me and my three sisters’ designated seats, with a big heart-shaped box at one end for my mother. It was reliable and consistent, as is his love and support. “The only guy a girl can depend on,” so they say. I don’t really believe that entirely, but my dad surely was always there when I needed him, and I can’t say that for many other men.

    Back to present time though, or actually last night, when tales of dread were posted on Facebook about “V-Day.” I tried to help those in need and imagined today would be more of the same. This morning, however, when I checked in to the all-telling social media Web site, I found the inspiration I really needed. I was “invited” to a Share the Love fund-raiser at which those who attend choose a charity and donate to it.

    Finally, someone is making sense of this holiday. I immediately went to wingsoverhaiti.org, donated through PayPal within seconds, and felt very satisfied. (Funny how Barry White came on as I wrote those last words — oh, the universe has such a great sense of humor.) Feeling grateful for the opportunity to use the day for good, I was then ready to start my regular Tuesday activities. What I did not realize was that it was time to begin the receipt of several unexpected text messages and e-mails.

    The first was an offer to visit from a guy I met on vacation in Florida last month, complete with flight dates and numbers. I am not sure if this is what led to a slight loss of breath, or if it was my fear of commitment, or the fact that the e-mail was followed immediately by a series of texts from an ex-boyfriend who hopes I am “okay” and misses me. I had deleted him from my phone intentionally, so I was not aware of who was wishing me the happiest of silly days. I responded and then got caught up in his charm and his picture of his abs, which he said he had been working hard on at the gym.

    I told him I hoped he was working on his brain as well and tried to salvage the joy of my morning ferry ride from Shelter Island, looking forward to arriving at work to go into my headphone-and-Mac writing escape world. Funny, the playlist shuffle just chose a song that he burned on a CD for me, back when we were dating, “They Got Nothing on You, Baby.” Oh, there were some good times.

    Now it is starting to make sense why I’m excited about my evening’s Valentine’s Day plan of attending the Sag Harbor Village Board meeting and then writing about it. This plan is reliable and consistent, like my dad.

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

   Rusty Drumm wrote recently in the praise of fish and fishermen, likening their tales to love sonnets, and to Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .” in particular.

    It was a really wonderful piece, and yet among the 154 sonnets Shakespeare wrote, there are few that are as transporting as number 18.

    After reading them — the first 126, including “Shall I compare thee,” written to a Young Man, and the remaining ones to the Dark Lady, who appears to drive him crazy — one can be forgiven for concluding, although we’re warned not to treat the sonnets as a diary, that they show Shakespeare, an adept when it came to treating of love, to have been a rather unlucky lover.

    The Young Man (the Earl of Southampton?) was apparently willing to admit impediments to the marriage of true minds, and the Dark Lady’s fooling around drove Shakespeare to feverish madness and to conclude that she was “as black as hell, as dark as night.”

    “Maybe he was too taken up with his writing,” Mary surmised when I’d finished Helen Vendler’s “The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

    But, by the same token, these unrequited, or periodically unrequited, loves provided plenty of stimulus for his kaleidoscopic brain, and the sonnets that resulted are intricate, complex, and reflective, anything but Johnny-one-note paeans to Venus.

    Time’s bending sickle, though, is the real villain, summer’s lease having all too short a date. Yet we are urged to bear it out even to the edge of doom.

    Well I shall, and gladly, having been blessed with the love of a woman of infinite variety, generous to a fault, and rare to find it (though when she does, watch out), who, as I began to inch my way back from the doghouse not long ago, asked if I still had that quote of Dante’s that I had pinned to my office wall almost 27 years ago.

    I did. A beacon to blithe lovers such as I, it warns, “How brief a blaze a woman’s love will yield if not relit by frequent touch and sight.”

    “. . . If this be error and upon me proved / I never writ, nor no man ever loved,” Bub.

   Looking ahead to Presidents Day weekend, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is getting ready to tally North American birds in what it calls the Great Backyard Bird Count. Unlike the almost invitation-only Christmas counts for experienced birders, this one draws on the willingness of even the most casual observers, so it appeals to me with my middling identification skills.

    Last year, I took a crack at it, submitting a checklist along with more than 92,000 others from all over New York State. Observers counted 11.4 million birds of 594 species. I was responsible for logging 224 birds of 8 species, mostly gulls, although a fair portion were goldeneye, black duck, and mergansers, which I saw in Napeague Harbor.

    My home hamlet of Amagansett should be better represented by birders I concluded after seeing in a list on birdsource.org that the 83 herring gulls I counted that day were just about the only ones for which numbers were submitted by only three people. Submitters from the East Hampton ZIP code coincidentally produced a mere 83 herring gulls in five reports.

    There was a lone checklist filed from Montauk in 2011 from a single observer who counted 59 birds, with 14 red-winged blackbirds the high-species winner. A single observer put in a list in 2010 as well. It’s wide open territory for the ornithologically oriented to make a mark.

    The process of taking part in the Great Backyard Bird Count is simple enough. Participants are asked this year to tally birds for at least 15 minutes on at least one day from Friday, Feb. 17, to Presidents Day, Feb. 20. You can count in as many places as you like, so, for example, I might peer through my binoculars at Lazy Point for a while, then head to Montauk to look at sea ducks at the Point.

    Regional checklists can be foundon the birdsource Web site, which is where results are entered daily. One of the features that I appreciated in the online form was that I could rate my birding skill as fair, good, or excellent. Presumably, this allows the lab to mash the results using a sophisticated mathematical formula to account for the fact that from a distance, for example, I find it hard to tell a hen mallard from a black duck — and forget about me and sparrows.

    This year, I hope to get at least one of my daughters interested in helping out. Provided it is not too cold or windy and that I can set up in my truck where the viewing is good, I may get some help from youthful eyes. Maybe we will beat last year’s gull count.

   Since I’m having surgery on that part of my leg that I promised in my last column I would never write about again on the morning after Valentine’s Day, it’s a sure bet that my husband and I will be spending Valentine’s Day at home watching “Jeopardy” while he cooks dinner.

    It will be even better if there is a storm raging outside and wind and rain thrashing against our windows, with a fire burning in the woodstove and my dog at my feet.

    We watch “Jeopardy” every night and our favorite part of the show is the little stories the contestants tell Alex to give the audience a peek into their personalities. If their stories are any indication, they might want to think about getting a new life.

    One guy, an adult, bragged about squeezing 13 people into a bathroom. Another whined that his favorite cereal was discontinued, forcing him to search all the local supermarkets for it. He finally found one that had four boxes left, so he scooped them all up.

    That’s the best they can come up with on national television, with all their old high school chums watching?

    Oh, the tales I could tell Alex. One of the best, though, is from when I was three months pregnant and visiting my mother on City Island in the Bronx, where I grew up. After a family dinner, I was suddenly doubled over with stomach cramps. Either my mother had just poisoned me or I was having a miscarriage.

    I was rushed to the hospital and it turned out my appendix was ready to burst, which is never a good thing to have happen when you’re pregnant. I needed emergency surgery, stat! At this point Alex would chuckle and say something comforting and move on to the next contestant. But I’d grab his arm and say, “But Alex, wait, you have to hear the rest of the story.”

    Because it was so early in my pregnancy there were no visible signs of a pregnancy and not enough time to run a test. They had to take my word for it, which, for some odd reason, they seemed reluctant to do. Jeez, I didn’t think I looked like a liar. Why would anyone lie about a pregnancy unless they wanted to trap the guy they’re with? I had already hooked him a few years earlier with my charm and good looks.

    They couldn’t knock me out so they gave me an epidural and told me I’d probably lose the baby, our first, and one that was desperately wanted. While I was on the operating table my brother, an anesthetist, was in the room. I could feel them cutting my belly open and flashed upon a fish being filleted with its guts running out. I was a bit wobbly from the sedation but aware enough to know that my brother was looking on. I didn’t want him to see my bits and pieces, so I asked him to leave.

    While all this was going on, my family called my husband, who had stayed back in Montauk and told him to get in there and bring whatever he thought I might need. When he arrived he brought with him his slippers that I often wore around the house and were about four sizes bigger than mine — not a pair I would wear in public.

    After the surgery I couldn’t laugh at all because it hurt so badly. My sister came in the room and as she went to kiss me tripped over the clodhopper slippers and fell right on my belly, which was stitched up like a zipper. (A bikini cut was out of the question for a pregnant woman.) Her fall, besides hurting me, made me pop a few stitches, but also made me laugh until tears ran out of my eyes.

    People are usually encouraged to walk around after surgery to expel the gas that is in their body after they’ve been cut open. My cousin Ricky, who was more like a brother to me since he practically lived in our house (my mother and her sister were married to brothers), pushed my intravenous pole while we walked the corridor with me tooting away, mortified, but without a choice.

    I’m having the surgery on the day after Valentine’s Day and I expect a bit more tooting on the car ride home. I hope it’s a nice day so we can keep the car windows open. But we’ve been married for 38 years and have been through an awful lot as a couple, what’s a little flatulence between lovers? Happy Valentine’s Day, honey! Toot, toot, toot-toot, toot.

—

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   Following a minor medical procedure recently, I had to be slapped awake from what was presumably a slightly overlong stay in Never-Never Land.

    Throughout the flurry of pummeling (during which my left hearing aid may have been broken, though its demise later that day or the next could have been a coincidence), I kept saying, “Blissful . . . blissful.”

    Oblivion wasn’t such a bad thing after all, I thought as I lay stretched out afterward in an adjacent room, wondering what kind of anesthesia I’d been given and making a note to request it should I ever make that one-way trip to Switzerland.

    Later in the week, another health care professional I know said he presumed it was Propofol, “what killed Michael Jackson.”

    “You can’t beat it,” I said.

    Soon after, reality, in the form of my addled hearing aid, began to impinge. I took it for examination to my audiologist, who pronounced it dead on arrival, as I had feared, and, of course, that begged . . . no, not begged . . . raised the question as to whether I should be beggared by the cost of a new one.

    She told me, with a smile, that the new ones, albeit they cost around $3,000, were so good that “people are always bringing them in asking me to tone them down.”

    That was good news, in a way, for I’d given up ever hearing really well. And, despite what I occasionally say, and despite what my interlocutors occasionally think, I would very much like to participate fully in life — except when on those very rare occasions I’m blissed out on Propofol.

    The prospect of anteing up three grand for a hearing aid was anything but blissful, of course, painful in fact. I told Mary I really ought to be able to write it off as a professional expense, rather than have it lumped in with my medical bills, inasmuch as my job depended on it.

    But I could hear (well, see) the I.R.S. countering at my audit that since I habitually misquoted people— even myself! — they were denying the claim. And then they’d probably tack on a fine.

    My audiologist said that my wife, for one, would be happy that I could hear better, presumably inasmuch as I would no longer have recourse to plausible denial.

    She handed me the silenced hearing aid as I got up to leave, saying hopefully, “Maybe it will revive with some C.P.R.”

    What will it be like to hear with clarity? Stay tuned.

    Or will I be like the guy who bragged of his new one and who, when asked by his friend, “What kind is it?” replied, “Three fifteen.”

   A dozen eggs were on the counter waiting for me when I walked into Crossroads Music on Monday night. Michael Clark, the proprietor, had read a recent lament in these pages in which I had observed that my home hens had taken the winter off.

    Lisa and I take our older kids to the shop one evening a week for music lessons, and Michael had resolved to share the bounty of his younger birds. I can sympathize; when our flock was in its first laying year, we had so many eggs that we tried to give them once a week to the East Hampton Food Pantry.

    Those were the days, though our hens’ decline is not unexpected. Having had chickens as a child, I remember that after a couple of years production trailed off. They freeloaded out their days, pecking at their feed and offering us only the entertainment of watching their regular squabbles.

    Even if impractical and expensive, there is a certain satisfaction in keeping a flock of chickens around. As a side result, I have become much more aware of our neigboring ecosystem. I fret that predators will somehow get through the wire fencing. All of a sudden in the last few weeks there have been raccoons about, knocking over the garbage cans and slinking along Cranberry Hole Road after dark. There are signs that mice hang around the shed where I keep feed, searching for fallen grains. Hawks greedily drift by overhead. A weasel’s tracks show up in the snow.

    The two roosters begin to crow before dawn. We have gotten used to their noise. I let them out when it’s time to wake the kids up for school, then refill the water and feeder.

    Well before nightfall, the birds will hop to their roosts. I release a ring on the outside of their yard to shut their steel-lined door, keeping varmints out and the cocks’ racket inside. It’s a nice routine. Sometimes lately, I’ve been getting eggs; mostly I just play farmer.

    On Tuesday I fried two of Michael’s dozen for breakfast. By coincidence, there were four eggs in our coop. It was as if our birds were trying to tell me something.