A Year of Gratitude – July 29, 2024

I found gratitude waiting for me in the nestbox today. As a chicken keeper, you always hope to find fresh eggs waiting there. No matter how many years I have been keeping hens, I’m still excited to find one.

There’s just no amount of egg collecting that dampens the sense of pride you have when you collect fresh eggs from your own hens. It’s magical to tend to a flock and have them reward you with fresh eggs. It’s been over a decade since we collected our very first egg and I still get a thrill from it.

This morning, I found three fresh eggs waiting for me in the nest when I finished my morning round of chores. With any luck, there will be a few more by day’s end. If not, there’s always tomorrow.

As always, I told the girls “thank you” as I moved the eggs from the nest to my basket. It seems only right to thank them for their hard work. Those three eggs will make a delicious omelet to begin our day in the farmhouse kitchen. I’m certainly grateful for that.

To keep chickens is to tend to hope. You have to hope that your work, especially during the long New England winter, will be rewarded with dozens of fresh eggs. When it is, all that hard work seems so worth it.

We have hens that lay olive green eggs, brown eggs, white eggs, and blue green eggs. These are my favorite. I love the brown freckles on their surface. Perhaps that’s because I have freckles myself.

I hated them as a child because kids made fun of me for having them. They made me different in a way that I didn’t choose and I didn’t like.  I’ve grown to accept them as being a part of me. I no longer mind them. They merely connect me to my mother whose freckles I never minded when I was a girl. It’s funny how you can dislike something about yourself that you accept and love about someone else.

When I see them on these eggs, I smile at the thought of my children calling them “freckled eggs” when they were little.

Being a chicken keeper has added so much joy to my years living here at the farmhouse. I hope that it will bring me many more with plenty of fresh eggs to collect, thank our hens for, and make breakfast to nourish my family with.

This post is part of our A Year of Gratitude Series. You can find the introduction, inspiration, and entire year’s gratitude’s posts here.