I finally found an egg. I lifted the lid of the nesting box in our chicken coop last Saturday, and it was there. Perfectly shaped, light brown, and still warm. I gasped – then looked around to see who had produced it, but the chickens were off in another section of the backyard, digging for worms and oblivious to my startled delight.

A new world order of backyard chicken-dom has begun.

We adopted four baby chicks in early June as part of the week-long camp we host for our four grandchildren every summer (see Squirt). We were complete novices when we brought those tiny balls of fluff home with us, and it has been a non-stop educational experience for us ever since.

At the time, I thought it made great sense to raise chickens: we could provide a hands-on science lesson for our grandkids for a week and then enjoy a free daily supply of fresh eggs after that.

Then we discovered that chickens don’t actually lay eggs until they are 5-6 months old. Those two-week old chicks still had a lot of growing and developing to do – and we had unwittingly enrolled in a months-long, egg-free immersion course on the art and science of raising backyard chickens.

I think we have learned something new every day since then, and it has been a fun and fascinating adventure – even if the top end of the “minimal” investment I assured my husband we would have to make in this endeavor has yet to be quantified.

Worried they didn’t have enough room in their coop, we added an enlarged run to give them more space; concerned about predators, we installed a solar powered, AI-enabled “Coop Cam” that emits a barking sound when it detects threatening animals near their coop (and it allows us to watch the coop on my phone from anywhere); and to make sure they aren’t too “cooped up” when we are away, we installed a larger enclosure around the coop to let them graze and explore.

And the return we have received on our investment in the care and feeding of these chickens? Well, it certainly hasn’t been the daily supply of eggs I was anticipating.

In fact, a funny thing happened on the way to finding that first egg. I realized it was no longer about the eggs. Those little feathered poop machines have brought us more daily joy and laughter than we could ever have imagined – and they’ve added priceless character to our backyard. Even if…

• They devoured the winter vegetable seedlings that had finally sprouted in my raised beds,
• They’ve turned our backyard into a chicken poop minefield (it’s supposed to be a great fertilizer, but it’s not so great on your shoes)
• They periodically send us on wild chicken chases when they fly off the side porch and try to wander near the road or into a neighbor’s yard.

Our chicken experience reminds me of the last bit of the film Annie Hall – where Woody Allen (playing the lead male character, Alvy) is musing about a recent encounter with his former girlfriend, Annie Hall (brilliantly played by the late Diane Keaton)…

“After that it got pretty late and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again, and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her, and I thought of that old joke—you know, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy! He thinks he’s a chicken!’ And the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but—I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd, and I guess we keep going through it because most of us … need the eggs.”

Even though some relationships can be the emotional equivalent of an upside-down roller coaster ride, we don’t give up on them because we love (and need) the color and chaos certain people bring to our lives. It’s not what we can get from our relationships with other people that feeds our souls, it’s who we can become through those relationships that really matters.

And if you can get eggs along the way too, bon appetit!

“Two are better than one, Because they have a good return for their labor:

if either one of them falls down, one can help the other up.” Ecclesiastes 4:9-10