“There’s a grouse on your lawn,” our neighbor Don said. He liked to sit on a garden bench and toss improbable statements over the fence. “Funny,” I said, not turning from the porch I was painting. “No, really,” he said. I kept painting. A few months earlier my husband, Mark, and I paid a gentleman farmer in Bloomingdale $25 for a half-dozen tawny speckled chicks and named them things like Hawk, Sparrow and Junco because they looked so much like wild birds. They had grown into rangy adolescents that followed our dog around the yard because we didn’t (yet) have the heart to pen them. So the chickens were on the lawn a lot, slowing cars, drawing comparisons to forest fowl.
