After several years in the country we still had not solved the grasshopper problem. Nearly everyone that we talked to told us that what we needed to do was to get some guineas, which are something like little chickens on steroids that practically live on grasshoppers. It turned out that one of Lester and Twila's many kin raised guineas and would sell us a half dozen babies (called keets), and a chicken to mother them, for a nominal fee. We asked why we needed the chicken and were told that guineas make terrible mothers, so it is necessary to have the eggs hatched by a chicken, which then thinks that it is the keets' mother and does all the things that chicken mothers do. Keets don't look a whole lot like baby chickens, so it wasn't real clear to us how the hen manages to convince the rooster that the keets are his, but apparently he doesn't pay any support so he doesn't really give a rat's behind. In any case, we cut the deal and set about building a chicken coop and a covered chicken yard.
A couple of days after we finished the chicken yard, Lester and Twila's kin, Wanda, showed up with four keets, a white hen and two poults, which are baby turkeys. It turns out that the hen wasn't such a hot mother either and had stepped on two of the keets and trampled them into the mud soon after they pecked their way out of the shell. So Wanda brought the poults in their place. She assured us that turkeys are even better at eating grasshoppers than guineas. After she was in her truck and about to pull out of our lane Wanda told us that, oh by the way, the hen would see the poults as threats to the keets and would try to kill them, so we had to keep them separated. She also told us that we should make sure that the turkeys stayed inside out of the rain until they were fully grown because they didn't have enough sense to do that on their own and the chill would kill them. In addition, she told us to be sure to give worming medicine to the poults because otherwise they would get worms and die. Wanda said that she got her worming medicine, and other poultry supplies at the Dually Feed Store, one of two feed stores in Dually, the closest town to where we lived. So we kept the turkeys in a cage in a corner of the chicken yard that night and spent the next day subdividing the chicken space and building a coop for the poults, while trying hard not to step on any keets in the process. Soon they were all snug in their little chicken wire beds.
The next morning we drove into Dually and stopped at the Dually Feed Store to get some poultry feed and worming medicine for the poults. The man at the feed store told us that he didn't stock worming medicine because no one in the county used it. We were a little worried about that, but the poults looked fine, and we were real busy that week, so we just blew off the worming medicine.
That night was a chilly one. We had a VFD meeting after supper. It was dark when we left the meeting and it had started to rain. We mentioned that we had just gotten the turkeys and guineas and one of the folks at the meeting asked us if we had locked the poults in their house because, if they got wet, they would die. So we rushed home and, sure enough, the poults were out cavorting in the rain. By the light of a flashlight we gathered up the poults, wrapped them in dry towels and ran through the downpour to the dog kennel where we dried off the poults and put them in a box in the kennel house with a heat lamp to keep them warm. We were soaked to the skin, but the turkeys were still alive the next morning.
It was about a week later when we learned that, while chicken wire keeps the birds in, it doesn't necessarily keep the varmints out. My wife had gone out at first light to feed the poultry and noticed that one keet was missing, and the hen had herded the other three into the corner of the pen farthest from the coop. My wife yelled for me to come out to see what the problem was, but from her description I was pretty sure that I already knew the answer. After taking a quick look at the situation I sent my old girl into the house to get my trusty .22 and then I managed to get into the guineas' side of the poultry yard without letting the hen and keets out. That was a trick because the hen kept trying to herd her little brood out the door whenever I opened it a crack to try to squeeze in. When my wife returned I lifted up the coop and, sure enough, there was a big old chicken snake coiled up under it with a keet-sized lump in his belly. When the hen saw him she went nuclear and tried to attack the snake and me too. Meantime the remaining keets ran all over the pen flapping their wings and kicking up a fuss. All that confusion made it easier for my wife to slip the varmint rifle to me but the birds kept getting in the way while I tried to get a bead on the snake. Eventually, however, they all ended up at my side of the pen for a few seconds and I got a chance to turn the snake into a hatband. The sound of the gun going off startled the hen and keets and it was ten minutes before I could get them on the far side of the pen again so that I could throw the snake out the door. It was a heck of a way to start the day and we spent most of the rest of that day grumbling about all the things that could go wrong in the country.
To be honest, after three years of living beyond the sidewalks we were getting a little tired of country life. It seemed like nothing had worked out the way we had planned. We had had this vision of our kids and grandkids traveling over the river and through the woods to our country paradise for holiday dinners and get togethers. That rarely happened though. Although we were only around an hour or so away from one of our kids and an hour and a half from another, they seldom came out. Whether it was because they had business out of state or other commitments or the country air had a bad effect on their allergies, or the ride was too long to make with young grandkids or whatever, it seemed like more often than not we ended up driving the two to three hour round trip to town to see them. Those trips seemed to get longer every time we did it. In fact, it was a long distance from our place to anywhere. The closest store that was more than just a gas station was twelve miles away. The closest real supermarket was 30 miles and it was that far to a hospital as well.
My old girl felt pretty isolated because she didn't have any friends nearby and she had to call long distance to talk to the friends she had made in the burbs over the many years we had lived there. The phone service was not real reliable and the cell phones only worked if we drove a mile up the road to the top of a small hill. If my wife wanted to meet her friends for lunch or to attend a club meeting, she had to drive a 100 mile round trip to do it. Although I was officially retired, I was doing contract work much of the time we lived in the country and had to drive that 100 mile round trip to work as well. After a year and a half I cut a deal to work part time from home with only one trip into town per week, but that didn't work out too well either because there was no broadband service available in our area, so all of my work over the Internet had to be done over a serial phone line. TV reception was OK most of the time, using a small satellite dish, but at that time we couldn't get local channels over the satellite. We couldn't get them with an antenna either because there was a hill between our house and most of the local TV stations.
We did a lot of grumbling that third spring and wondered whether we were really cut out for country life. I put the garden in, though, and now that we had the poultry we looked forward to a summer without grasshoppers, although we were down to one turkey by that time. We had noticed that one of them had started to make green droppings, which Wanda had told us was a sign of worms. So we called her to ask what to do and she asked us if we had been giving them the worm medicine. When we explained that we had talked to the man at the Dually Feed Store and he told us that we didn't need to worm the turkeys, Wanda snorted in disgust and told us that we had gone to the wrong feed store. She meant the one in downtown Dually, which isn't called “The Dually Feed Store”. So we went to that feed store and got some worm medicine and gave it to the turkeys on a regular basis, but one of them died anyway. We still had the hen and the remaining guineas, though, and I started letting them out of the pen during the day so that they could eat the bugs in the garden as our neighbors had told us to do. That worked OK for a couple of days but by the third day the hen refused to go back in the pen and she and the guineas began roosting in the woods in the creek bottoms. About once a week we would hear some squawking and the next morning there would be one less guinea in the garden.
By midsummer of that year we decided that Green Acres wasn't really the place to be, at least not for us. So we called in a realtor and put our country dream home up for sale. The realtor told us that it usually takes a long time to sell a place in the country so she talked us into signing a six month contract. We thought that was OK because it would give us more time to look for a house in the suburbs. My wife wanted to move back to the subdivision we had lived in before, but I wanted to be on the edge of the burbs because I had gotten used to not having neighbors close to the house. So we started looking, with the expectation that we would have months to find a place.
One afternoon, less than a week after we had put the country place on the market, a young woman with a couple of kids came out to see it. We sort of staged things by strewing ranch cubes along the fence to draw the cattle up where the prospective buyer could see them and my wife put a pie in the oven to give the house that homey aroma. We showed the woman the house and I took her and the kids on a tour of the barn and what was left of the orchard. Then, after making sure that the cattle had moved into the field near Lester and Twila's place, I took our prospective buyer out to see the woods and back pasture. As we returned to the house we walked past the poultry pen. When I told the woman that we had some guineas and a turkey I wondered why my wife, who was carrying a paper bag, kept shaking her head behind the woman's back. The reason became clear when we came abreast of the turkey pen and I saw that it was empty. It turned out that the remaining turkey had picked that exact moment to go to that great meat-packing plant in the sky and my wife had the corpus delecti in the bag.
We only had three sets of prospective buyers come out to look at the place the first month it was on the market, but that was enough because the last couple bought it. We even managed to sell them most of the equipment we had accumulated. So the good news was that our country home was sold. The bad news is that we didn't yet have a place to move into.
We had spent the last month looking at houses in the burbs and had put a deposit on a lot in a subdivision on the fringes of the suburban area we had moved from three years before, but it would take six months to build a house on it. About the time that it appeared that we had a buyer that was serious about buying our country place we stopped by the subdivision where our lot was located and noticed that there were several spec houses for sale. We talked to a realtor about them and she showed us one which was partially finished when the buyer had backed out of the sale. The realtor told us that we could put a deposit down on that house and, since it wasn't yet completed, we could make some changes to personalize it. She said that if the contract on our country house didn't close by the time the suburban house was ready for move in, we could back out of the deal without losing our deposit. So we signed an agreement to buy that house just a few days before the firm offer came in on the country place.
When the sale of the country place closed our suburban house was still six weeks from completion. That worked out in our favor, though, because the buyers weren't able to move into the country house for another month. So we ended up renting the place back from them for a month and then moving all of our stuff to a storage facility and bunking with one of our kids for two weeks before moving into the suburban house. During the month we rented the country place from the new owners we had many changes of heart and “What the heck were we thinking?” moments, but before long we were back in the burbs and the country place was just a memory.
