I realized today that I haven’t posted anything here in quite awhile. Time has been flying past and my efforts at writing have been confined almost exclusively to my first blog, Sherman’s Behind, which (somewhat satirically) follows the tedious tale of Sasha’s thus far futile attempts to collect some money owed to him by the photographer, Sherman Hines. With Sasha’s claim for back salary soon coming before the Labour Standards Tribunal because of a frivolous appeal by Mr. Hines, and a forthcoming lawsuit against him in the Small Claims Court maliciously filed by Mr. Hines, we’ve been busy. Not to mention the fact that Sasha is away again working on another film. 

In the meanwhile, here in my real life, nothing worthy of a blog post has been going on although the rhythm of my days has been pleasant enough. The arrival of the dreaded black flies has also been accompanied by a number of real delights. Last week-end, using a recipe posted by a friend (and avid Martha Stewart fan) on Facebook, we enjoyed an incredibly delicious pie made from the rhubarb growing in abundance in our garden. Just outside the door we have fresh fragrant herbs to cook with, the magnolia is in bloom, the barn swallows have returned to make their nest in our hayloft, and the animals are all happy to be grazing in fields that are actually green.

In the barn for the past few weeks a broody hen sat faithfully atop a clutch of eggs, a sign to us that there would soon be fledgling chicks to wonder at and care for. But the day after I returned excitedly from the Farmers Coop with a bag of chick starter and the shallow little waterer needed to keep the little birds from drowning, we discovered the mother hen smashing and eating the eggs on which she once so patiently sat. While we know that cannibalism is not uncommon among chickens, we still have no idea why this happened when it did. In any case, there will be no little chicks born here and that is sad.

There have been other poignant notes too as I watch some of our geriatric animals sinking very slowly into their ultimate decline. Especially when I’m alone here, it’s hard not to think about these things constantly and I do. Scully, one of the four old cats, has become incontinent, howling madly in the middle of the night for reasons only she can discern. Thalia, one of our original sheep, is now so arthritic that she spends most of her time lying down. Kacha, at twenty-one the oldest of the llamas, is terribly thin despite a ravenous appetite and spends her days apart from the others in a strange quiet world of her own. It is only a matter of time.

On the personal front, I’ve renewed (encore une fois) my resolution to become a regular at our local gym and for the last several weeks have made frequent appearances there. Usually I go with a friend, which by definition, suggests kinship of spirit and often likeness of thought. This morning, however, while the two of us were torturing ourselves on the treadmill, we were joined by three ladies from the small community in which the gym resides and I recognized all over again how very different I am from the indigenous inhabitants of this place. Slightly smug in demeanour, more comfortable in their tanned and toned skins than we are, much farther to the right politically, and entirely too interested in the business of others, they scared the pair of us half to death. 

Disinclined to speculate on the sex lives of our neighbours and disagreeing (as we both do) that all the people incarcerated in Canadian prisons should be deployed to die in Afghanistan so that “decent” people don’t have to, my friend and I resolved to try for a different time slot next time. There’ll be iPods and ear buds involved too -  just in case.

Except perhaps for the The Dude and the fact that the Academy Award for Best Director finally went to a woman, the Oscars last night were just plain boring. We watched because it’s a ritual of long standing at our place, in recent years most probably because we both welcome any excuse to nibble on hors d’oeuvres and drink champagne. Despite a connection to the film industry and the fact that we love movies, we are not really into the Hollywood thing anymore.

Sasha, dead beat from a long cold week on set, crashed at eleven thirty but I made it through to the bitter end, finding myself wishing in the cold light of day that I hadn’t wasted my time. I have a very real life to contend with and need all the sleep I can get.

.Just before Christmas last year, our friend Jo-Anne asked us to adopt her chickens as she was planning to spend the winter months elsewhere. This addition to our menagerie consisted of a rooster with five hens, a second rooster with three hens, and a little bantam named Rufus who, in order to escape the aggression of the other males, needed to be housed on his own.

Since there’s simply nothing better than a farm fresh egg, we entered the adoption joyfully and proceeded to house the two groups in separate locations, giving little Rufus the run of the barn. Because the days of winter were then so short, the man of the house hooked up light bulbs on a timer to augment the limitations of nature and provide fourteen hours of light every day.

Suddenly, the single egg that Jo-Anne had collected every morning became two, then three, then four. As the hours of daylight continue to lengthen, the count has now risen to six large beautiful brown eggs every single day. Spelled out a bit differently, this means that while I’ve been living here on my own five days a week, no fewer than forty-two of these treasures laid by our happy hens have needed to be dealt with by me every seven days. 

The problem is obvious: a person can’t eat eggs at every meal. Since others in the area sell their overflow to passers-by, there isn’t much of a market out there either. I am up to my eyebrows in eggs.

Long ago having mastered the creamy scrambled eggs cooked over a double boiler as favoured by the French, we have by now added the perfect omelette, the quiche and the souffle to our household repertoire. We have used eggs to make pie shells and challah and their whites to make Pavlovas and lovely light meringues. We have shirred eggs, devilled eggs, coddled eggs, fried eggs and baked eggs but the hens just keep bringing them on.

Yesterday in a kind of crazy ovo-desperation, I turned to the Internet, where I discovered that eggs can indeed be frozen if they are removed from the shell and beaten slightly with a little bit of salt. I put the dozen most recently produced into the freezer with glee in little containers marked with the date and the number of eggs contained within. Four more were used to make 24 mini-quiches, some of which became Oscar fare and some of which were headed for the freezer too. One I had in a sandwich for lunch. But this morning there are already five more.

When city folks hurl themselves headlong into the romance of country life, there is no existing manual for the truths that lie behind the wonders they initially behold. Nobody tells you, for example, that the roosters who greet every day with the crowing sounds you absolutely love, will kill one another (or at the very least peck out each others eyes) if not managed carefully by you. It is a job like any other.

Chickens, fed well and left to range,  lay healthy eggs, reduce parasites and add wonderful fertilizer to the soil, it’s all true. With the lacy patterns on their feathers and their soothing clucking sounds, a few chickens really should be part of anybody’s rural dream.  

But alone or as a couple, being inundated by three and a half dozen eggs every week? Maybe "dream" isn't the right word. 

Last Friday was Sasha’s birthday although when he arrived back here that night from his work in the city, he was far too exhausted to celebrate anything. The film business, whenever there is any, is hell on domestic life.  Snowbound since the previous Tuesday, I couldn’t even make my way into town for so much as a bottle of wine so the birthday boy himself brought home Chinese take-out that we ate in our bathrobes in front of the fire.  It was cozy and utterly fine.

With the loss of a beloved llama and the sudden craziness of the new work routine, I am adjusting to being a film widow somewhat more slowly than I have in the past. It has been awhile and I’d grown accustomed, after so many years, to having another person here all the time. Now things are topsy turvy  again and the realities of country life belong, as before, all to me. After imagining myself in an existence drenched with abstract cerebral activity and contemplations of high art, I now begin each day as the sole caretaker of a mixed menagerie. 

In the course of a conversation I once had with a friend on the subject of equilibrium, we told one another of the particular things in life that were keeping us on an even keel. She had been going through a particularly stressful period in her professional life and found music to be a great leveller whenever her reality sped out of control. I remember telling her then that my own sanity could be defined by that hour or so every morning that I spent in the barn shovelling manure.

As I think about this now, with new callouses forming on my hands, I find myself back again in that simpler, quieter world where the CBC and the other media are the background to my living and not the voices that shape what I perceive and feel. In the world I share with these animals, there are basic requirements for well being and there is Nature, the ineluctable centre of everything else I do.