The "Not-A-Hick's" Guide to Chickens: Part III

Now that your “baby chicks” are beginning to be able to flap around, refuse to stay in the cardboard box and have trashed your bathroom, it might be time to consider moving the chickens to a more appropriate out-of-doors enclosure.  Chickens are not house pets, and it is likely that you no longer need me to explain why.

Preparing for the move is important.  Throughout the course of your “baby chicks” short lives you will have begun (at the 3 to 4 week mark) to slowly reduce the heat available to them under the heat lamp, thus ensuring that by the time they are fully feathered they are used to living without it’s warm and faux-nurturing presence.  Fully, or mostly, feathered birds can manage their own internal temperatures, food consumption, etc.  By this stage of development your ‘adorable baby chicks’ will have also started behaving like little assholes to each other and the beginning of a life-long pecking order will have been established, with some birds on ‘top,’ happy, loved and in charge, and other birds on the bottom.  Unhappy, constantly under physical duress, and forever trying to be with the flock that doesn’t want them.    Do not feel sorry for the bottom chicken on this rung.  It doesn’t do anybody any good and that chicken is there for a good reason.  It may have been smaller as a chick, experienced an injury or just be the slow un-wanted one.  Either way, somebody has to hang out a the edges as an early warning system that a predator is nearby.

Chickens have approximately zero ability to engage in moral reasoning and although it applies to them to some extent, no appreciation for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  They certainly have no propensity to care for a creature that is smaller and weaker than they are.  In Chicken-Social-Strata, someone has to be that bottom rung.  No ifs ands or buts about it.  Chickens, like people, are generally only nice to other critters that can give them what they want.  If you don’t believe me, turn on the news.

As you prepare to move the birds outside remember that whatever enclosure you create for them it has to be sturdy enough to withstand the explorations of local predatory type animals.  Your chickens have just made your backyard the magnet for coyotes, raccoons, foxes, dogs and the neighbors big tomcat.  If you don’t believe that these sorts of animals exist in your neighborhood because you live in the “city” just leave your chickens outside for a night without a sturdy enclosure.  

Then start over with a new batch of baby chicks.  

Now that you’ve got your second batch going back in the bathroom,  it’s time to construct a home for them.  Your chickens may be able to live in your fenced in backyard during the day, but having a pen large enough to leave them in for a few days or a week at a time can be very conducive to your being able to go on vacation and have someone else tend them.  An ideal home for a chicken will have both indoor and outdoor space, elevated food and water dispensers and varying heights of perches and nest boxes.  Your birds should have more outdoor space than indoor space, and for their safety you should either have a “floored” indoor space that they can be closed into at night, or you should sink chicken wire down below the level of the ground on each wall to keep diggers from being successful at getting midnight snacks.  I recommend the former solution, it’s easier and it can help you manage cold weather, brooding hens and the need to continually catch the chickens for your four year-olds edification.  

On day one of their new living space do not let the chickens into the yard, giving them a week or two of simply being in the pen will imprint onto their tiny impressionable brains the idea that the pen is where they live. Without this impression getting your chickens to return to the coop as night falls will be virtually impossible.  Unable to find either the bathroom, or their cardboard box in the tub, your chickens will conclude that they are lost, and attempt to sleep as far off the ground as they can propel their little chicken bodies.  Chicken memories are very short.  “Home” will become the coop in less than a fortnight.

If they’re nearing that 8-10 week mark as they are adjusting to living outside of the bathtub, you might even get an early layer who learns that the nest boxes (always stocked with clean straw) are a good and safe place to lay eggs.  This will be an invaluable lesson, but unfortunately it’s not one that you can control.  Your chickens will at first lay eggs wherever they please.  It will only be age, luck or a lazy streak that will compel them to lay eggs in the coop where they are easy to find.   You can remedy this by placing the eggs you will find under your porch, in the dog house, behind the hose and on your neighbor’s lawn chair in the nest boxes until the hens figure things out.

At this point, the 10--14 week mark, your chickens should be living outside, mostly feathered, losing their short-lived and limited ability to even do anything that vaguely resembled flying.  This is also the point at which any “pretty chickens” you’ve somehow landed yourself with, will begin to crow..

40 Days of Gratitude: Day 38

            During my visit home, my mother's new next door neighbor started the process of clear-cut logging the land next to her house.  The land I grew up on.  By the time I go back again, it'll be bare, empty and utterly destroyed.  The trees will have been razed, and there will be machinery tracks cut like scars into a suddenly empty hillside.  The road will have been torn up by the trucks lumbering up and down, and whatever was there before will simply be gone.  Forever irreperable.
          It cut into my 40 days of gratitude for Lent pretty damn hard.  
          40 days that I thought would be really easy to catalogue.  40 days of how damn lucky I am.  Lucky to have opportunities.  Lucky to have friends.  Lucky to have health.  Lucky to have life.  Lucky to take shot of Whiskey each of the nights that they are howling, to rock my demons to sleep.  Demons that a person as lucky as me doesn't really have any business grappling with.  Because I lead a charmed life.  A life full of adventure, of travel, of good times spent with good people, and a life of opportunities seized by the horns.
          After all, I'm busy studying at a world class university, busy performing standup and keeping fit.  I have no one to visit in any hospitals, and no graveyards where I leave flowers.  I have never been mugged, attacked or spat at.  Never not recognized how very charmed my little life seems to be, how I have (and have had for years) a Golden Ticket to opportunity and adventure, as long as I work hard to keep it.
          And yet the trees are falling.  Stripping away the protection they once offered the hillside.  Laying bare it's secrets, and emptying it's soul.  Peeling back the layers to stare at what was below the forest canopy.  Painfully, unwillingly, and without mercy.
            The clear-cutting, although totally unrelated, slashes pretty deep because it seems symbolic of a process that my famiy is going through.
         One I'm too afriad to tell anyone about, because I'm somehow convinced that what I think, what I say, and what I do, will be used to hurt people I love.  
          One I'm too afriad to talk about openly because I've been told point blank by more than one person, that what I believe, how I think and what I feel, matters in a very real way.  
           One that may very well define not only what the next four months will look like for me, but the next forty years.  
          I hold my Golden Ticket, clenched as tight as I can get it in my fist, and am reminded as the trees fall, that it's not mine.  I did nothing to earn it.  Every advantage I am given is because of a disadvantage someone else is forced into, every step forward for me, is a step backwards for someone else.  And on top of it all, I get to hold that Golden Ticket knowing all the while that people I love dearly are being destroyed and destroying.  That my choice is between stepping forward and away, to pretend I don't see/can't see what's happenning, or open my fist and turn around.  Saying goodbye to an opportunity that seems less and less like it's mine, in lieu of taking on a responsibility that I've known my whole life I'd one day have to shoulder.  Who knows, maybe something will shift or change for the better.  But I doubt it.  I've learned to be smarter than to expect that.  And when this all plays out, I'll write something with actual details.  From where-ever it is I end up needing to be, doing whatever it is I end up needing to do.
           Because sometimes you can't take the opportunities you are offered, because you are needed elsewhere.  Sometimes you can't have adventure, because it's someone else's turn.  Sometimes you can't be whole, because for someone else to heal, another person has to carry the burden of being broken.  Sometimes we all draw the short straw.  And sometimes we have to choose to draw the short straw, because the person who has held it for so long, can't carry it anymore, and they are breaking those around them with their pain.
         Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote, "What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it," and this is no different.  Someday I'll be able to write about it in detail, laugh about the ironies over beers with friends, and those demons won't need more than a cup of tea to quiet them even on the worst nights.
           Someday, however, is not now.  Now I get to grapple with being the Girl With A Golden Ticket.  Standing on a train platform, knowing I can never leave.  Because while the Golden Ticket buys my way out of this mess, it's not just me I need to think about, and I know no one else strong enough to step in and help.
           And despite all, it's still 40 days of Gratitude, and the rules are that I come up with something I am grateful for every day of Lent.  All freaking 40 of them.  Even the ones where I'd rather crawl into a hole and hide.  The days I wish I could pretend weren't.
        So 40 Days of Gratitude: Day 38: For being able to remember dark days in the lightest of all possible ways.  Because someday, that's how I'll get to remember today.

Between Home and Where I Live: Flying

           There's a moment, when a plane is barrelling down a runway, and the engines rev.  A second of energy diverted before the nose lifts up and there's no going back.  When I fly, I like to count the seconds between the flight attendants sealing the door and the roar of the engines increasing, just that little bit, to lift us off the ground and launch us into the sky at 600 miles an hour.  Somehow in my brain I have the idea that up until that second, I haven't committed to flying.  To hurtling through the air in an aluminum and steel tube from one place to another.  That there is a magic "escape" button that I could still push while the wheels are on the ground that would get me off the plane.

          I technically know better.  The last actual moment to chicken out and bail is the second before they close that door at the end of the loading ramp.  Sealing us and our pressurized air into the tube.  Minutes, and sometimes even an hour (depending on the airport and the day) before the plane is actually in the air.  With each of those seconds that I count, I remind myself how lucky I am.  I bought  plane ticket.  I can live in one place and visit another that is half way across the country or the world.  Continents and oceans are no barriers to what I can see and where I can travel.  i have the extraordinary privelege of strapping myself to a plastic seat, and quite literally flying through the sky.  
           And yet.  The act of clicking "purchase" when buying a plane ticket is quite literally terrifying.  Because flying means a handful of things every time it happens.  Flying means that I need to leave a place that I usually like being.  Whether it's home or somewhere else.  Flying means that I need to again face my own irrational fear of literally falling out of the sky.  Flying means re-evaluating the way that I live my life, as I see it again in another light.  The light of perspective added by a new place, or an old place revisited.  Flying means embracing the unknown of the future.  The reality of not knowing what the next second or the next hour or the next week, or month or year will bring.  I know that that unknown exists in each and every second.  Waking up in an unfamiliear bed doesn't make the day less predictable than it already wasn't.
          Being alone in a new place doesn't mean that the unexpected is more likely to occur.  It just means that I am more aware of the tenous nature of our experience.  The unexpected quality of life.  The subtle balance we play between responsibility for the future, and total blindness as to what it holds is one we all hold each and every day when we get out of bed in the morning, brush our teeth and go to work, planning our next vacation day or the weekend yet to come.  
          Every time I fly, I am reminded how short the days are that I get to count as they slowly pass by.  And that is compounded whenever I fly between the city I call home, Portland OR, and wheve-ever it is that I happen to live.

The "Not A Hick's" Guide to Chickens Part II

One thing that you may or may not have thought about before acquiring your “baby chicks” is the breed.  Unlike popular culture might suggest there are in fact a wide variety of “chicken.”  Not all of them look like a little red hen, and none wear aprons.They come in all sorts of sizes, shapes, health problems, genetic defects and temperaments.  A good rule to follow is that the pickier you are about how pure-bred your chicken is, the more likely you are to encounter some sort of creative health problem at some point in the chicken’s rather short life.

Be warned.

Common sturdy “farm” breeds include Barred Plymoth Rock, Rhode Island Red, White Leghorn, Star Red, Orpington, Golden Sex-link, Hamburg and Black Sex-Link.  If you went into a feed store, somewhere in the rough vicinity of whatever city you live in and randomly selected a handful of “baby chicks” the odds that you have at least one of the above breeds is pretty good.  They are cheap, plentiful, lay boring colored eggs, and have just enough “mutt” in them as a matter of rule to keep genetic defects resulting in slow and painful death at arms length.

However, if you did just drive out to the local feed store and buy a random assortment of “baby chicks” from the bin you may have also gotten some “whoever got lucky with whatevers” i.e. Farmer Joe’s batch of eggs from his flock of mismatched mutt-birds in the back.  They may or may not have been properly sexed, but they will probably lay a lot of eggs and live a long time.  Given that they are not male.  In which case they will both lay a decidedly smaller number of eggs, and live a decidedly shorter amount of time.

There is also the very good possibility that you got really excited about having chickens and spent hours poring over photos on the internet, and decided that since you can only have 4 or so per city regulations, you might as well have four “pretty birds.”  In this case you may have selected something like an araucana, americauna, any number of fluffy bantam varieties, a polish or cornish hen, any one of the variety of “game birds” (good luck with that one!), verwork, sizzle, sultan, yokohama, russian orloff, sumatra, frizzle or silkie.

Some of these breeds work out relatively well, araucanas and americauna’s lay lovely blue/green or green pastel eggs.  About once every 4-5 days.  If having chickens is not something you want to do to help feed the family that’s fine.  Otherwise they are generally sturdy birds who are shy, quiet and surprisingly nasty when other birds come down with disease or weakness, and depending on the degree of purism, sultans, verworks and russian orloff’s can make wonderful backyard birds.

Silkies, Frizzles and sizzles are an entirely different story.   All bred to have unusual feather patterns these birds come with a whole slew of common health problems probably also caused by the genetic narrowing that allowed for their gorgeous and difficult to keep clean plumage.  Silkies look like the have fur, frizzles have feathers that curl backwards, and sizzles have feathers that just plain curl----sometimes to the point of corkscrews.  These birds are all really fun to look at, and have won a fair number of farm kids blue ribbons in the 4H division at the county and state fairs.  They are not great egg layers, and due to their unusual fluffy rufflage they can require actual grooming in order to keep clean enough to stay healthy.  They are also unlikely to even be able to fly the 10 or 15 squawking feet that most chickens can fly if something scary happens.

As far as I can tell this makes them no more or less catchable by predators such as neighborhood dogs and foxes, but easily identifiable when you discover the piles of bloody feathers left as remains of some exciting meal had by some neighborhood canine or kitty.

For the purposes of this simple guide let’s assume that you’ve chosen one of the more manageable breeds.  Lets fill the flock with two star reds, a rhode island red, a barred plymoth rock, an araucana blend (not purebred!) and a transylvanian naked neck for good measure and creativity.  Your little “baby chicks” have been pre-sexed and the only fatality to date was one little barred plymoth rock that woke up dead one morning about a week into the whole “having chickens” process.

Congratulations.  You’ve got a good survival rate, have been feeding them properly, making sure that their bedding is changed and letting your kids play with them, because even though it’s added stress on the birds now, if you don’t get them accustomed to being handled while they are young it will never happen.  If you let a bird hit the 8 week mark without handling it you will never be able to catch that chicken.  It would, and will, rather die first.

You see, while your bird will never regard you with the warm and trusting eyes of friendship that you may have grown accustomed to with some of your mammalian pets, this does not mean that your bird will necessarily run in screeching fear every time it sees you.  A sort of guarded trust---similar to the guarded trust between the USA and the USSR between 1949 and 1991--can be developed between you and your birds.  You can enjoy close proximity, even a sort of “frenemy” vibe that hides the tension that your chicken(s) will ALWAYS be feeling below the surface.  In order to accomplish this you need to start out young, before the “baby chicks” develop enough confidence to run away.

The more time you and/or your offspring spend handling the “baby chicks” the more brainwashed the birds will be as they age to consider human contact one of the necessary evils of life in your miniature “urban farm.”  This contact will make life much easier later when you are dealing with health problems, feeding, finding hidden eggs or having a row with one of the perkier hens over the human acquisition of those hidden eggs.  

The process of hand raising your “baby chicks” can be fun, pockets can be lined with handkerchiefs (the birds will deposit turds EVERYWHERE) and “baby chicks” can, with much are, be carted almost anywhere in your house and yard.  Do be aware as you and your offspring are carting about and caring for the “baby chicks” that these tiny innocent chirping things can carry with them their entire lives several nasty strains of Salmonella.

If you are not familiar with salmonella thank whatever deities you consider holy.  A mild case can knock you out for a weekend, emptying your digestive tract (from both ends) of all contents, and resulting in severe dehydration, fever, muscle cramps and general miserableness.  In people with existing health conditions, or just people who contract a particularly bad strain, it can be fatal.  Giving your family, friends and neighbors a story capable of shutting everyone else up at a cocktail party and turning them into minor social outcasts.  

I would not recommend contracting or dying of Salmonella.  In hopes of preventing this, and continuing to handle and work with your “baby chicks” I would ensure that the “baby chicks” are never near food, or food preparation and that all clothes and hands that come in contact with “baby chicks” are cleaned thoroughly as soon as the “baby chicks” are deposited back into their little habitats.  This rule applies to Growed-up birds as well.  It’s exactly the same reason that your grandma never let you lick your fingers after basting the Thanksgiving Turkey when you were young, dumb and inclined to do such things.

The "Not-A-Hick's" Guide to Chickens. Part I.

So.

You have gotten a chicken.

You live in the city, and you have gotten a chicken.

You have lived in either the city, or the suburbs your entire life, never been remotely connected to the things that you call food, never managed an animal that didn’t come when it was called at least part of the time, and never owned anything that really truly might eat you if you were dead and available besides a cat.  And you have gotten a chicken.

Congratulations.

Step one.  That chicken?  It is not your friend.  It might tolerate you, and a certain fondness might eventually develop, but that chicken will always remember one thing, and that is the fundamental difference between you and the chicken and the simultaneous reason that you and the chicken cannot be friends.  That chicken will know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, in its own simplistic way, that the only thing standing between you and your desire to kill and eat the chicken is mere economic happenstance.

No, the chicken does not understand economies of scale, the mass production, slaughter and transportation of its fellows to grocery markets where you can purchase fluffy white meat at a fraction of the “real dollar” cost of production.  Nor does the chicken understand the job market, stratification of economic spheres, nor the complex social structure that defined, before you were born, the extent to which you would have to be connected to the true consequences of the choices you make in terms of food and all else in your life.  No.  The chicken does not get much of that.  What the chicken does get is that it is small, catchable and plump, and that you, like all predators, have forward facing eyes, sharp canine teeth and could become hungry.

The chicken needs no more information than that to understand that should circumstance shift, its tenuous relationship with you becomes secondary to its role as a source of good protein.   

If you’re smart, you acquired the chicken in juvenile format (aka “baby chick”), and it is now either living under a lamp in your bathtub, or under a lamp in a cardboard box somewhere in a bath or laundry room in your house.  If you were doubly smart you made sure before you acquired the juvenile chicken that it was pre-sexed.  

Most “baby chicks” purchased from large retailers these days are “pre sexed.”  That means that within 6 to 18 hours of full hatching the “baby chicks” were sorted in a factory by workers getting paid next to nothing, and the ones that came out “male” were summarily executed.  Their frozen corpses will be sold to zoos, pet stores and other businesses or organizations that need to feed small snakes or birds of prey.   

I would not share this information with any young children that you plan on continuing to shelter from the ways of the world.  In buying sexed “baby chicks” you are in essence choosing from day one to shelter these children from the reality that might hit them like a brick the day that city ordinances necessitate the “disappearance” of the “pretty chicken.”   Either don’t undo that choice, or buy unsexed chicks.  They are cheaper and the lesson will be more poignant.

Now that you have the “baby chicks” settled into your bath it’s important to remember a few things about their first few weeks of life.

1) one or more of them may die.  Baby birds are delicate little things, and it is often in these most early days of life that a genetic mishap, or sheer stupidity itself can result in “baby chicks” simply dying, drowning while they try to drink, or developing some quick infection that kills them off.  It’s normal to lose one, two or a whole batch.  

2)  If you fail to regularly clean and replace food and water you will lose them all.  Baby chicks need a lot of high calorie food to keep growing.  As you are a person who lives in the city who got chickens the odds of your being an “organic foodie” are high.  I am most sorry.  Your chicks should eat a commercial chick starter feed for at least 8 weeks.  These are babies whose mother has been murdered by your society.  Please try not to kill them by feeding them in-adequately.  It will not ruin the “al natural” state of the eggs that they will begin laying at the end of the year to feed them a starter now, and the industrial antibiotics that food is laced with will keep most infections your birds could easily die of at bay until their little immune systems turn into little tanks.  

3) Your “baby chicks” without their mother, need temperature regulation.  For the first week maintain a temperature (using a brooder lamp) at 90-95 degrees F.  You can reduce the temperature by 3-5 degrees each week until you hit about 70F.  Until your “baby chicks” have grown feathers some form of a heat lamp is probably a good idea.

4) Make sure that the tub or cardboard box is filled with some form of fluffy litter that is cleaned frequently. Baby chicks need something to “nest” in, old paper shavings work wonderfully.  Until they have grown feathers (again) it’s important that they have material to nest down into.

Some common problems that you might encounter in young birds, or birds that had a hard transport from factory to feed store or feed store to home, or are experiencing stress because a large gang of small predators keeps “playing” with them, can be sluggishness, dietary problems, and intestinal problems.  Some solutions:

If your birds are sluggish try mixing about 6 tablespoons of sugar into each gallon of water that you give the birds.  If they continue to have a hard time eating you can mix this “sweet water” in with feed, and let them eat the soupy mix until the perk up.  It sounds gross, but remember, these are chickens, and a) the extra calories won’t hurt them, b) the grosser the food the more they like it, and c) they are chickens.

A frequent but difficult problem can be your birds “pasting up.”  This means that your “baby chicks” are experiencing some form of intestinal distress, and this is resulting in them not being able to completely expel turds.  They’ll end up with a smear, or a spot covering their little anus.  This can be life threatening.  Don’t just grab it and pull it out.  You might also pull out their little colon.  If you think the idea of having to explain the elimination of a rooster will traumatize your children imagine what killing a “baby chick” by accidental disembowelment would do.  Trust me, it’s not a pretty picture, and once done there is no undoing it.  “Baby chicks” are too small.  Sometimes it can be managed with rabbits or sheep, but only with much trouble and considerable know-how.  

Instead of dealing with that, you can simply soak a cloth in warm (not hot water) and very gently clean the “baby chicks” rear end.  The hot water should dissolve the turd.  As the birds get older their systems should settle down and they’ll age out of this unpleasant but somewhat common stage.

Remember that the “baby chicks” are probably only going to be happy in their indoor enclosure up to the point at which they can escape.  This should happen around the 4 to 6 week mark and believe you me--you should be prepared.

One last note: if your “baby chicks” come banded make sure that you remove those bands within 7 days.  These birds are growing, and if you leave the bands on you are going to give yourself and any of your offspring that are involved in caring for the “baby chicks” an object lesson in limb death.  This lesson, along with the lesson we’ve already discussed on disembowelment, are most likely best saved for High School biology and already-dead pig fetuses.

Part II coming soon....

Home

       "Home."
        I won't lie, I'm not totally sure I know what that means anymore.  The place that you live?  The place that you grew up?  The storage boxes of all the things that you'll have when you can "someday" afford a house?  The mountains that snagged half of your heart?  The friends that make life not only worth living but worth loving?  The desk you stare at, day in and out?  The coffee shop that is your favorite?
        Maybe home is a good beer, or the steady click of oars on a long empty lake in the morning as the sun comes up?  It could be the crunch of gravel under your feet, or the familiar feel of your bike pedals straining as you push up a hill.  Home.  Is it that place that forever changed you?  Taught you who you were?   Or is it a room, with a bed and stack of books you're meant to read before the end of term?
        I honestly don't know.  My adult life has been an amalgam of places, people and new things.  Between the ages of 18 and 25, I didn't sleep in the same bed, in the same room for more than a 10 month period at a time.  I bounced around from Oregon to California, up and down the Mississippi river, to Guatemala and Mexico and back.  I collected dishes I liked, and a table runner made by a friend I loved.  The things that I owned got sorted and purged and put in boxes.  Then I got a job, an apartment, a community that I loved.  I spent three years deciding that I might just have found "home."
        A job that I loved.  A hobby that gave me a second family in improv.  A bedroom covered in color and a bicycle to obsessively ride around a city that I identified with, a place that screamed in so many ways "me!"
        And then an opportunity to go to graduate school popped up.  And I did what I almost always do.  I said yes.  Even though it meant moving a half a world away.  Leaving my job and my friends, redefining "home" as yet again a place that was far-away from where I would be living.  I took all of my things and put them back in boxes, I gave up my apartment and cleaned out my closet.  I put my life into two bags and a carry-on, and checked them at the American Airlines counter on October 2nd 2013, then said goodbye.
        I started over.  Again.  For the umpteenth time.  Further defining my twenties as a decade of movement and change.  I decided that a year, maybe more, of my life would see me cycling across cobblestones and receiving emails about the ongoing repair of my departments several hundred year old building.  My life would become defined by article after article on gender theory and performativity, and I'd go back to rowing---on a narrow river, not a pristine lake, but hey--rowing is rowing.  
       I found friends.  People that I can honestly say I hope to stay in touch with forever.  I discovered a favorite coffee place, and learned to like wine.  It took me some time, but I started to settle.  I started to see that I *could* happily do a PhD in Cambridge, that I liked doing stand-up and eating a sandwich on King's Parade.  That this place too, could be "Home."
        But as I stumbled off of AA1215 at 7pm on March 17th and cried when I saw Portland's famous carpet, I realized that the hard thing about "home" is that I have more than one.  My home is an old timber town hit on hard times that never seem to end.  My home is a lake in Washington County where your oars reflect across mirrored water.  My home is a pink bicycle and Portland beer.  My home is a neighborhood in SE where I will someday buy a house.  My home is in the folded endless mountains of the Alta Verapaz, and in the redrock deserts of the SE United States.  My home is an ancient University town in Europe, and my home is defined by the people I am lucky enough to be surrounded by, and they live in all the places I've ever spent large chunks of time.
       Home isn't, and can't ever be, just one place for me.  Part of that seems unbearable, like I'm pulling out chunks of my heart and leaving them snagged on the peaks and valleys and cobblestones of a half a dozen cities across the world.  But part of it is wonderful--because it means that "home" can be anywhere I'm willing to let it be.
       That said, I'm damn happy to be back in PDX.  Because this place is HOME in a million and one ways, and I have friends here that truly feel like my family.

That Kinda Christian

       "What will you give up?"  
        I kind of dread that question.  The one that sneaks up on me as Mardi Gras comes to a close and what I'm contemplating is whether I should go savory or sweet with my pancakes.  
        "What will you let go?"  
         My relationship with "being Christian" is tenuous at best.  Most years I do Christmas.  It's easier socially that way.  This year I didn't, best Christmas to date.  I'm a huge fan of Easter---after all, who doesn't love rabbits and an excuse to eat chocolate all day?  I light candles in Catholic churches for people who've asked for prayers.  I go to mass in Latin or Spanish when I just need to breathe.  I've read multiple translations of the bible cover to cover, and massive academic tomes about the founding of the faith, who was Judas really?  Why were the gnostics hunted and killed?  
         Although I'm sometimes a little too shy to say so out loud, I spent a year of my life living in Guatemala as a Young Adult Volunteer with the Presbyterian Church USA.  Driven there by a crises of not only faith, but morality.  And that year forever changed me.  I am in no way who I might have been.  Because of faith.
         But when I'm asked "are you Christian?" I have to pause.
         What do you mean by "Christian?"  I want to ask.  Do you mean I believe in a white bearded Caucasian God sitting in a throne in the sky, ticking boxes next to my name that will add up to either eternal life or damnation?  Do you mean I rely on 4,000 year old texts to tell me what is right and wrong?  Feeling justified in my harsh judgements of others because a book called Leviticus told me so?  When you ask if I am "Christian" are you asking if I believe in a fundamental difference between men and women, and if I adhere to that standard of behavior?  Do you mean to ask if I attend church every Sunday, or if I have accepted Jesus Christ as the Lord and Saviour into my heart mind and soul?         
         Are you asking if I believe Mahatma Gandhi will burn in hell because he didn't?  Are you asking if I've arbitrarily decided that one faith, because it says so in a book, is the only path to "salvation" and if I believe salvation means eternal life as an individual holding a harp, sitting on a cloud in the sky?
         Are you asking if the cornerstone of my life is a secure knowledge that I am "right" and others are "wrong" and that they will be punished if they don't come around to my way of thinking?
         Because if that's the case, the answer is no.
         Or are you asking if I am Christian because the idea of a faith comforts me in the cold dark middle of the night?  If I believe in holding onto my cultural heritage, and that heritage includes Christmas and Advent and Lent?  Are you asking if the values a man from Galilee espoused 2,000 years ago are values I want to live with?  Values such as sacrifice, forgiveness and love?  Am I Christian because I believe that we ought to be a little more socialist and a lot less greedy with what we have, and because that faith demands I examine my economic position in the world and be accountable to the damage it causes?  Do you ask if I am Christian because you too seek path guided by compassion both for yourself and for others, one where you know in your heart of hearts that judgement is not yours to cast, that the man who ostensibly founded your faith taught acceptance, love and kindness above all?  That the people he lived with and taught were the same kind of people that "Christians" today spew vitriol towards?  That to follow that faith isn't "easy."  It's not screaming at people for loving their partners, or leading lives you can't understand; it's living in poverty because you dedicate your life to social justice and spending your afternoons comforting people who make you uncomfortable?
         If so, my answer is not yet.  Not because I don't believe in that kind of faith, but because it's a goal I'm working towards, and one I have not yet come anywhere near.
         And for Lent I'm not giving anything up, because I don't think that was the point of Lent.  For Lent I'm remembering every day what it is I have to be grateful for, and reminding myself that whether I believe in a "God" or not, Christianity is about far more than just "accepting Jesus."  Christianity can be about changing the very fabric of the world---if only Christians are courageous enough to see that sometimes faith is not about how afraid you are to die, and assuaging that fear with a belief that casts you in a good light compared to others based on random moral principles, but it's about how you live---and what you do to help those around you.  It's about who you visit in jail, whether you walk by someone who is hungry, if you support or encourage social institutions that leave children and their families destitute.  If being "Christian" is really about justice--and not fire and brimstone you're gonna burn because I don't like the way you look/act/sound justice--but lets create a world where no one starves kinda justice, then yeah.  I wanna be that kind of Christian. 
         Happy Lent.