Oscar loves his chickens so when he reached under one them — only to find a crushed egg — the eleven year old with bent up wire rimmed glasses + farmer’s hands — flung that bird out of its roost. In a flurry of feathers and a cacophony of squawking (which he ignored) Oscar scooped up the warm gooey mess – dropped it onto the muck floor of the chicken coop and ground it in.

‘Let me tell you something’, he said definitively, ‘Chickens are carnivores – you have to remember that…once a chicken gets a taste for egg that’s it. They’ll eat their own’. Truth — spoken from a kid who learned how to count to ten sitting on a tractor tire while his mom dunked fresh-killed chickens in & out of scalding water. ‘Slaughtering’ she says, ‘as with all the beasts, is part of the process — the give + take-circle thing.’

Later — that egg-eating bird got a string tied around its foot – so it’ll be easy to find for dinner.

After school, every day – when most kids are playing soccer, ninentendo or having their dance lesson – Oscar takes care of about 30 chickens. The arcanas lay watercolor blue and green eggs, the bantams – tiny toy sized ones, and the black chickens lay brown eggs…He collects, washes and packs up dozens of them to sell at his parents’ feed store, the local grocery and some of the B&B’s.

When you crack one of Oscar’s eggs into an iron skillet with hot butter – you can tell the care – sunrise saffron-colored yolks bounce back, the fresh whites are taut, gelatinous + don’t thin or spread out.

The money he earns — he invests back into his business for egg baskets, feed and fencing. He dreams about someday buying an island in Maine just for his chickens so they can run free. Oscar declares, ‘And my little sister Lucy – she can have an island of her own too — for her + her sheep.’

The boy spends a fair amount of time watching the sky while he’s tending his flock. If a hawk starts circling — a threat to his birds – he’ll toss some chicken feed out and away from the coop. He knows that scavenger crows will find it first – so when the hawk comes back again – they’ll harass and chase it relentlessly, until the predator gives up.

Only one of his birds has a name – it’s an exotic Polish breed that’s got a shock of head feathers that poof up and flop over its face. He bought it from a flock that’d been misidentified as roosters but then it laid an egg. But naming this ‘boy-that’s-a-girl’ chicken after his Midwestern grandmother, Pat, who is also of Polish descent, is not her idea of a compliment. That’s ok to Oscar. He loves all of it – the bird, his grandmother, the communal name.

Oscar cooks up omelets with his eggs, with bacon on the side from their pig. According to him – that’s how he gets his vegetables – first he feeds them to the pig and then he ‘gets them in the end.’

For Oscar — and his family — that is the way of the farm. It is always a beginning and an ending and a beginning (all over again).