By Eleanor Deckert
First I was happy Then I was sad. Now I am waiting with a disturbing combination of eager anticipation and gloomy dread.
Let me explain: I have another hen setting.
Previously, we have purchased fluffy, yellow, cheeping, adorable chicks in a box. Is there anything that rates higher on the “Cuteness Scale”?
But now, we are participating in the life cycle here in our own chicken barn.
First: the red hen walked off the nest with five chicks. Chirping, pecking, scratching, learning from their mother, exploring the little pen in the fresh spring grass, the family is a picture of domestic bliss.
O happy day!
Next: the white hen set in the barn with the other chickens. They added eggs to her clutch totalling 17 
eggs! We moved her into the smaller chicken maternity ward, leaving her with eight eggs and putting ten into the incubator under the kitchen table.
On Thursday, two yellow heads peeked out from under Mama’s wing. Happy Dance!
On Saturday, a chilling find. The next chick had pecked half way around, but it died before the task was complete. Oh, so sad. Poor little unborn precious creature!
Then I heard cheeping and pecking within another egg! Shall I bring it into the incubator? Leave it with the mother and let Nature take its course? It felt like such a heavy weight to wait through the night.
By morning, there was one peck through. But it died in the shell, too.
“OK,” I tell myself, “It is ‘only’ a baby chicken. But still. Some live and some die.” The mind begins to tumble…. “Why?” and the ever painful, “What could I have done differently?” No one can ever answer these questions.
Now I wait. Ten eggs inside. Four with the Mama.
It seems to me that Doris Day got it about right.
“Que sera sera.”
What ever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see.
