Guest Post: Life as we never knew it

 As winter reluctantly began thawing into spring in NH, my husband and I were looking forward to some long-needed remodeling of our home. We had just replaced the roof and gutters and were happily choosing colors for a new stone walkway and porch renovation. Then reports of people coming down with a new aggressive pneumonia started trickling in. By the end of March, the world had changed. Borders and schools were closing and people were fighting over toilet paper. I decided to brave a trip to the grocery store and what I saw scared me. 

They were out of eggs. And not just the fresh cartons. There weren’t any eggs in sight – whole eggs, scrambled eggs, egg whites – nothing. Not even the insanely expensive, this-chicken-has-led-a-cushier-life-than-you eggs. Then I stood on my tiptoes and saw it – a package of hard boiled eggs waaaay in the back of the top shelf. The last eggs in the whole store. I asked a very nice tall man to reach them for me and was relieved when he didn’t take off with them. 

That was the day I told my husband we were getting chickens. He said, “Well, okay then.” and that we also needed to start a garden. We’d had plenty of land to use for years, but “life” kept getting in the way. A special needs child, my chronic illness resulting in disability, issues with our well, job layoffs, and finally my husband’s cancer diagnosis. We were finally getting back on track when the pandemic hit and changed the direction of lives around the world. We were some of the lucky ones, though, if you can call having both of us solely on disability income as “lucky.” We didn’t have jobs or income that would be taken away over the next several months. We traded our home improvement catalogs for garden seed catalogs and chicken coop plans. And books. Lots of books. Books on everything from raising chickens to garden companion planting, canning, seed saving, root cellars, dehydrating - and we got to work. Thankfully our daughters were sent home from college and were able to help us set things up when they weren’t trying to navigate their classes remotely.

There’s been a very steep learning curve over the past six months, but we now have nine healthy chickens – eight of whom will be providing us with eggs very soon and one surprise rooster who does a good job of keeping them in line. I’ve dehydrated, frozen, and canned hundreds of pounds of food grown on our own land and we are making plans for next year’s garden, learning from our mistakes and hoping to repeat what went right. 

We’re getting up earlier in the day now (thanks to the rooster), but it is after we’ve slept well, knowing that no matter what happens this winter, we will have provided for our family.