Helllooo my hens and chickens! I had a fleeting wish for some chickens this Easter weekend. Live ones, that lay eggs. I live in one of the wards that permits them, as long as a) you have a backyard, b) they are hens, not roosters or cocks (tee hee), c) they are at least 4 months old, and d) you keep them only for personal egg production. You can only have up to 4, and you can’t slaughter and eat them, nor can you sell their eggs for profit. I love eggs, and there’s something appealing and exciting about the idea of collecting a fresh egg or two in the morning, not to mention the soothing clucking of a happy hen to greet you. Then again, you’d have to clean out the chicken coop, which doesn’t sound very appetizing. Furthermore, we live right next to the park, which is home to foxes and coyotes. It could end very badly. So never mind.

 

We are all going a little stir crazy here, can you tell? John and I managed to have a bang up fight on Friday. We never fight, not anymore, and I can’t really recall what it was about, but to be honest, I think I was just bored. I mean, don’t tell him, but I think I just felt like stirring things up to see what would happen. He has a much longer fuse than I do, but when he blows he blows sky high. All I know is that we went to bed mad, but made up first thing the next day. I don’t know, guys, it was just something to do, and no real harm was done. I doubt our housemates even know it happened.

 

The biggest fight John and I ever had happened in June of 1992. We were in Paris for my sister’s wedding, which we were attending after having spent two weeks on vacation in Spain. It took us three days to drive from Barcelona because of a trucker’s strike, combined with a farmer’s strike, that managed to shut down all the major highways, shunting us off to the backroads, where we continually got lost. We had all sorts of adventures, some great, some harrowing, and finally made it to the outskirts of Paris, where, dusty and exhausted and completely out of sorts, we checked into a cheap hotel just to catch a quick night’s sleep before meeting up with the family the next day.  For some reason, I flew into an incomprehensible rage over nothing, and John ended up sleeping in the car. In my defence, and trust me, I had no idea at the time, I was pregnant with the person now known as Aidan.  The next morning, John came back, we made up (yes I know, it’s a habit), and he went back to get the car, which was parked in a garage several blocks away. Here’s where it completely falls apart: he could not find his way back to the hotel. He got turned around on a number of one way streets, could not speak a word of French, and could not remember the name of the hotel. Remember, this is long before we had cell phones. He was gone for about four hours. Four. Hours. While I waited with the luggage at the door of the hotel. Of course I thought he had left me. Despite making up, and despite the fact that we were about to attend my sister’s wedding, with my entire family in town, I was convinced that he had decided he’d had enough of me, and had absconded for good.

 

Finally, distraught, I called my friend Miriam, who was also in Paris at the time, taking a French course at the University. She immediately started screaming “He was here! John was just here!” Apparently he had managed to find his way to the University of Paris, where Miriam just happened to be sitting on a bench in front of her residence. Of course she didn’t know the name of the hotel, but once I told her, she said she would go back down and stay on the bench in case he doubled back, which he did, and she told him where to go, and he went, and we were reunited, and went to the wedding, and had a baby 8 months later, then another 6 years later, and lived happily ever after, until Friday.

 

The moral of the story is don’t count your chickens if you don’t have any.

 

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