Apples and Chickens

A short post today to share a short thought. As most of you know, we recently relocated the sanctuary here to Vermont, and are lucky enough to have five apple trees and two peach trees on the property (not to mention 30 years of gardening by a master gardener who has left us with beauty beyond what we could have imagined or created ourselves). We ate and froze and gave away as many peaches as possible, and have been gathering apples as well, to eat as well as to freeze.

Of course the chickens have all eaten a bazillion peaches and apples, and to be honest, are rather sick of them both, especially the apples since they last longer in the season. But the dogs and humans are still quite happy to have them.

Take a look at a couple of pictures of our apples:

They are not grocery-store pretty. They are bumpy and not uniformly colored. But they are delicious and healthy, unlike many “picture-perfect” apples one can purchase.

They remind me of our rescued chickens. The layers sometimes never recover their feathers from their time in the factories. The fighters never grow back their combs, and often have a scraggly look that carries with them through the rest of their lives. Yet despite everything these birds have been through, they are healthy and happy. They are not picture-perfect pastoral samples of what humans have decided chickens should look like; what the catalogs promise with their bright and shiny pictures of chickens. Instead, they are who they are. Real.

Just like our apples. They are who they are sans human tampering (or at least on the other side of human tampering). It gives me the faintest glimmer of an imagined world in which humans aren’t inserting ourselves into every picture, and makes me have the faintest glimmer of hope that one day, this will be true again.