01 March 2012
THAT MAY BE A MIRACLE YOU'RE (NOT) SEEING
I see miracles every day. Every day. I am in touch with the miraculous, hold it in my hands. Oh, I go looking for miracles--you bet I do. Stumble after them in the dark sometimes. Other nights, I shine a flashlight in the nests, reach in and take the eggs I find there. Eggs, the everyday miracles that populate my world. Eggs, amazing containers of possibility and life—breakfast, too.
Maybe I have a low threshold for wonder. Maybe not.
Each evening I gather the dozen or so eggs our hens have laid that day. Our mixed-breed chickens lay eggs in an assortment of colors, sizes and shapes. Some eggs are, well, egg-shaped. But others are pointy, roundish, squat or as near rectangular as an egg can get. Some have thin thin shells, others are almost hammer-hard. Colors range from white to beige, ecru to ochre. I've learned to associate certain eggs with particular hens. Mrs. Lapinski lays long white missiles, thin and pointy at both ends. Now in her dotage, CeeCee lays wrinkled, light brown beauties with what look like vertical stretch marks. One unidentified hen drops gargantuan bombshells. You'd think she'd be easy to spot—find the stiff-legged hen walking about with a look of perpetual stupefaction. Apparently she's in stealth mode.
It takes but a moment for a hen to stand, squeeze her pelvic muscles and allow an egg to gently drop onto a bed of straw. She usually climbs into the nest well in advance of this final production, however. Settles in, sits quietly, bides her time. The process began 18 to 36 hours earlier when her body released an egg cell into her oviduct where it could be fertilized by the rooster. Layers of white formed around the nascent yolk, then a membrane, last of all, the shell. The miracle of life in so humble a casing.
After laying the egg, the hen cackles to announce her success to the world around. The higher her status, the more likely the rooster and other hens will echo and amplify her cry. Me, if I'm within earshot, I'll echo anyone's cackle.
Despite what a rooster might tell you, a hen will lay eggs whether or not he's in the picture. In his absence, her eggs will be infertile. Great for breakfast, but no little chick will ever hatch from them. Most store-bought eggs fall into this category. Commercially-raised hens may go their whole short lives without ever seeing a rooster. Our hens should be so lucky. They lay fertilized eggs; our rooster sees to that. He never tires of sexual activity, goes at it almost every chance he gets. Let him mount a hen, bend his cloacae to hers, spray his misty sperm, and the egg she lays will contain the potential for life.
Take that fertilized egg from the nest, refrigerate it, and nothing more exciting than omelets will happen. Keep it consistently warm in an incubator or under a broody hen—one whose hormones have kicked in, convinced her she wants to be a mother—and in 21 days a chick will hatch from it. It never ceases to amaze me.
You've seen the inside of an egg. There's no chick in there. Only a big blister of yellow pus floating on a clear sea of slimy snot. How such glop and goo can be transformed into a living creature, a wobble-legged chick, wet, blinking, bedraggled, now dry, fuzzy and fluffy, ready to run, scratch and come to mother's call--how such a thing can be boggles my mind. This is the stuff of miracle.
It happens every year about this time out in our coop. Out of nothing, something. From snot and pus, peeping cheeping life. Happens out of sight, deep inside. Transformation and change.
Reminds me of the coming out process.
Reminds me more may be going on inside at any one time—inside me, you, or anyone else—than anyone could ever guess. Even now, today, a miracle may be hatching.
01 March 2008
GODZILLA IN MY BASEMENT

So it was that my husband and I spent several days last fall cutting, rolling, stacking huge logs. We later returned with a log splitter. With a long trailer last month.
Marvelous things, log splitters. Roll the log under, stand it up, hold it fast, drop the lever, watch the maul chomp down, hear the wood crack, see it split, make sure a chunk breaks loose, bump the lever up, watch the maul lift, stop its rise. Turn the log, repeat. Split and split until the pieces will fit into the wood stove. Steady work.
What amazes me is the number of solid-looking logs that house insects. We uncover sluggish colonies of black ants with a few winged queenly-looking members, smaller groups of big carpenter ants. A colony of winged ants. Black beetles. Brown ones. Wee white worms that bore wire-thin tunnels. White corkscrew worms—I imagine they twist and turn their way through the world. Then—and “hyre be monsters”—a den of gargantuan black beetles.
However, most dramatic are also the first found: huge white grubs with orange-yellow faces and greasy grey butts. Godzilla-like cousins of the dainty cutworms I find in garden soil. These are coiled under the bark, encased in powdery mulch-like sawdust. I save the first one we find, determined to winter it in our basement, see what develops come spring.
At first they are a novelty. By late in the day I’ve seen so many of these terrors they lose their power to amaze. When one falls out beside the splitter I don’t bother to move it. A few minutes later white gut grits spackle the ground.
I came out to myself as a gay man 13 years ago this month. At the time I was snuggled in a sawdust of my own making, married to a woman, every day father to three young children, working for a conservative religious-based organization. Coming out, I lost marriage, children, job. My world was mauled open. I imagined my guts spattered the walls. Indeed, prolonged custody hearings put on public display certain greasy grubs hidden in my character.
I continue to learn that I am riddled with hidden recesses in which lurk unknown energies—some twisted, some beetle-black, some bearing queen energy, some in the process of becoming. Becoming what, that’s the question. With the poet Czeslaw Milosz, I wonder,
Will it be a bright butterfly soaring over the earth,
Or a moth, dirty tribe of night?
Won’t be long now before the behemoth slumbering in our basement arises. Time, that natural ally of change and transformation, will play its part. So, too, the warming rays of the sun. Given the bottomless basement of the human heart, what might unfurl its wings this year in me? In you?
This essay first appeared in The Letter, March 2008