How the Hen House TurnsIt is spring of 1943, World War II on the home front. A 40-acre fruit orchard on the outskirts of Hayward, California becomes a haven of self-sufficiency as butter and milk and meat grow scarce.
Our family of four begins life in the country with our new pup, Boots, and the gentle cow, Buttercup, who loved my dad, Pa. As more and more animals are brought to live in and around the barn at our victory farm, childhood-long lessons in independence and integrity begin.
A calico kitten found under the schoolhouse grows into the tomcat Oscar, master of the 40 acres, a hardened veteran of the California bush. He fathers dozens of wild cats, disappears for days at a time, and tutors Boots in gopher hunting.
Buttercup learns to pick apricots and to limit (with a quick kick) her milkers to Pa, but she refuses to wear my brother’s invention, a cow brassiere, when it is most needed. Her calf gets more than its share. The county auction becomes an irresistible attraction to myself and Pa. Before long we have carted home two pigs 20 chickens, and 10 sheep in the trunk of our ’37 Chevy coupe.
The introduction of a chicken pen into the orchard reminds me of the chickens I came to know 25 years later, when I subconsciously recreated our Victory Farm for my own children, and the Hen House began to turn in New Mexico.
Back on the California farm, the neighborhood forager, a huge chestnut German shepherd named Browny, comes to a tragic end when he dares to lift his leg on the dog catcher who was bending down to fix a flat tire.
Meanwhile, my older cousin’s cocker spaniel, Butch, becomes a hero of the war when he and seven sailors escape from a sinking battleship. The sailors refuse rescue from an aircraft carrier when the dog is not allowed to board the rescue ship.
As I grow up battling shyness, the characters of our victory farm continue to provide examples of the value of aggressive self-assertion. Then when we escape to Lake Tahoe for relief from my brother’s asthma, I taste independence of a different sort during a winter that produced16 feet of snow.
After a year and a half at Lake Tahoe, we return to Hayward to find that there is no return to the kind of independence we once knew on the farm. The cow is sold. The cherry orchard belongs to someone else. The farm is irreversibly dismantled when the barn is converted into a cottage home for Grandma Snyder.
As I continue my teenage battle for self-identity, the hills between San Leandro and Hayward fill with houses. Pa sells our front 10 acres, then the farmhouse itself—after (mercifully) I have gone off to college. Our victory farm is reduced to a suburb.
I swore I would never go back. But here I am, still sharing the memories of a life filled with animals, first in Hayward, Calif., Tahoe, then on ¾ acres in New Mexico, and now in the redwoods, where the deer greet me on my morning jog, and unfamiliar wild birds fill the bushes beside my sunroom.
