In the chicken coop

The first thing to know is that hens are soft, so soft.

I slip my hand underneath her, but - surprise - hens do not like getting hands up their bums. She flies from her cubby, ruffling her feathers and exposing three eggs. I put them in my basket, then go to the next hen. When I finish, I have more than one hundred eggs.

A door opens inside me. Delight. I have collected eggs before.

Back in the room at the little hotel and farm in Costa Rica where we’re staying, I call my mom. “I could barely get you inside some days,” she says. My parents had kept chickens when I was little. I had loved them. I just hadn’t remembered.

Touching the feathers, pulling out the warm, delicate eggs, nestling the eggs in the basket, the gentle clucking, the chickens pecking at my feet. All of it conjures up a memory buried deep.

When we think of the subconscious mind, we think of trauma. Everything we don’t want to remember submerged in that dark, quick sand-y place. But the chicken coop makes me wonder if there are other treasures there, perhaps even deep wells of joy.

“What do I love most?” we ask in an endless quest to know ourselves. Our families, we say. Our work, if we’re lucky. But maybe there are simpler, sensory answers. Swimming, I say. Taking a bath. Rainy days. Reading. Bread and butter. Chickens.

Everyone has their own chickens. You just have to look beneath the surface to find them.