Birthday Chicks

You know I love my birthday. I am the birthday chick! Amidst the excitement and chaos of the holiday weekend, days before my Easter Sunday birthday I decided it would be a quiet one with the people I love most. So, I packed and headed to the place I’ve spent most of my Easter weekends – ‘home’.

Mom greeted me with a beautiful fish platter bright and early Sunday morning saying, “I’m glad you’re here.” On her way to church, she left instructions that my sister and brother should clean the kitchen as she knows I am always the one doing it and I should be pampered instead. She would return after church to make my dinner.

I went to the backyard around mid-morning and noticed that my brother was inside the chicken coop. Curious, I went over to see what he was doing. He explained that no worker was around so he was handling the process of transferring hundreds of 2-week-old chickens from the nursery to the larger section. Although I grew up on a farm, I was never so inclined, as the thought of bush, etc., was a bit too much nature for me. Mom says I used to cry when mud touched my feet. Still, I was always fascinated with baby chicks. But I felt Kemani needed some company and Kool 97FM playing in the background was an incentive, so I decided to stay.

I watched with pride as the Actuarial Science student made his way around filling the larger feeding trays, as I thought that our father would have been proud of him. Then it was time to prepare the watering system which consists of some bell-shaped containers. It wasn’t like this when I was there, as everything was manual back then. But then I noticed that the containers were tilting to one side, spilling water onto the saw dust. Bad idea!

It was in this moment I had a flashback of a dream which had jolted me from sleep around 2:00am that day. I was frantically turning off pipes in the dream. I realised that ‘farmer girl’ needed to emerge and play a roll in this. We both got to work for hours going back and forth trying to figure out. It seemed the most difficult thing. “This is Physics. I was never good at science subjects,” I said to Kemani at one stage. Between moments of frustration and asking each other questions like “why does it keep tilting?”, we laughed. “What a way to spend your birthday,” Kemani quipped, and we burst out laughing again. Some of you know that I am fascinated by the stars. Kemani, who celebrated his birthday days before mine, is also Aries with a ‘never say die’ attitude. He hadn’t eaten all day and refused to take a break for breakfast when I pointed out it was 1:00pm. “We’re making progress,” he said. And we were.

We had eventually realised that the watering system was sort of semi-automatic, so to achieve the balance, we needed to manually fill a section of it. Eureka! “I could have told the two of you that long time,” said my sister Stacy-Ann when I took a break and told her of the breakthrough. “Why didn’t the two of you call me? Must be April people, overdoing stuff,” she laughed. As if! Her Leo self would have probably waited 'til after the holidays and paid someone. LOL! All this time, while we sweated inside the chicken coop, she was inside the cool house watching Hallmark movies! Really?! Albeit entertaining Malik inside, who was up to his usual shenanigans and fighting a horrible cold.

By the time mom got home, we were just about wrapping up. My flip-flops wearing feet had met saw dust (not mud), but it was a most symbolic and fulfilling birthday experience bonding with my little brother in something our father had built when I was a little girl. It was in safe hands, even with a little help from the kid who feared mud. The symbolism was also because I was sharing a birthday with these chickens. Interestingly, when the barriers were removed from the nursery, they did not all rush out at once into the big space. It took a while before they began to spread into the space. I likened it to the emotions humans sometimes feel when transitioning through stages of life; excitedly cautious as we know not what awaits at each turn. We can learn from them, however, and take our time to transition through growth phases. Perhaps we might make fewer mistakes.

Humbled, proud and feeling loved, I give thanks for another year. Thanks for your wishes, from yours truly and the birthday chicks.

I am Suzette Campbell

Note: Originally published on April 23, 2022