Although it was Saturday, it started out as an ordinary work day for me. The alarm buzzed and I rolled out of bed at 6:10 am. Frank roused up, too, and went off in his bathrobe to check his email while I took a shower. When I returned to the bedroom I found six year old Cabell lounging on my bed and we discussed the plans for the day while I dressed for the morning hospital rounds. I had just sat down to put my shoes on when I heard the guineas begin a loud chatter behind our house. I listened for 15 seconds and was puzzled because their noise indicated they were out of the guinea house. I was certain I had closed their pen door last night after dark and they should have remained closed-in until I released them this morning. Shoeless, I scuttled to the window just in time to see a fat raccoon using his front paws to push open the guinea door while the birds continued to skitter out.
“He’ll eat them,” I cried and I ran for my shoes, slipped them on and tied them up before dashing down the stairs and out the door. Sure enough the guineas were scattered about the backyard and the pen door was open, but the raccoon was nowhere about. I’m sure I saw him, I thought to myself, but no one will believe me. Annoyed, I walked by the happily released guineas and returned to the house.
“I am certain I saw a raccoon let the guineas out,” I told Cabell who was sitting by my bedroom window, “but he’s gone.”
“No he’s not,” Cabell replied. “He’s there, in the tree.”
Sure enough the raccoon was wedged between the trunk and a branch of a pine tree 30 feet above the ground where our two dogs stood barking. Cabell and I alerted the rest of the family and we all kept raccoon watch until Frank and I went off to the hospital for morning rounds.
At lunchtime Frank and I returned home to find the raccoon had escaped the dogs and we seemed to be back to a routine day when the phone rang. It was Frank’s mom who declared that she had cracked one of our chicken eggs to use for cooking and it had a double yolk. While not unheard of generally, it was unprecedented among our chicken eggs. In the past year we had gathered hundreds of big eggs, little eggs, brown eggs and blue eggs and none had ever had two yolks. We were all excited and catalogued the particulars of this egg which apparently was a brown egg of ordinary size, but with an extraordinary double yolk inside.
In the mid-afternoon as I prepared to return to the hospital to check on a few patients Cabell began searching the kitchen pantry for ingredients to do some cooking. He’s big on stirring mixtures together to make a batter that he will drop by spoonfuls on a cookie sheet, bake and eat. As long as we stick with oatmeal, flour and sugar he usually manages a cookie that is sweet and won’t kill him. Today we rounded up the usual ingredients and I left him with our au pair to mix and bake.
On my return he greeted me at the door with a big smile. “I made bread,” He declared.
With a brief thought about what it must look like and taste like, I patted him on the head and said, “What a great idea, let’s see.”
He led me to the kitchen where to my utter surprise I found a well shaped 4″ by 8″ golden brown loaf.
We sliced it and the texture wasn’t bad either.
“Wow,” I said, “I’m impressed.” And sure enough short of a little salt it was pretty tasty. I supposed that on this double yolk day my six year old stumbling onto a bread recipe shouldn’t have been such a surprise.
After my bread snack I slipped into blue jeans and went out to the garden to look around and then walked on to the chicken house. As I opened the chicken house door the hens came running up as usual except Rooster the hen who remained sitting in the egg laying corner. I walked over to her and she remained firmly planted in the corner. I suddenly realized that after a year of laying and leaving finally Rooster had decided to set on eggs. “Well, why not,” I thought, “It’s that kind of extraordinary day.”
That evening Frank and I put the children to bed when company drove up. It was his parents with a bungee cord to put across the guinea house door. They had heard the raccoon story and feared for the lives of the guineas if that raccoon returned. We sat and reviewed the happenings of the day and I recounted my latest excitement with the discovery of the setting Rooster.
“Oh,” I said, “I forgot to tell everybody that while I was in the chicken house a wren flew by me up to the chicken house rafter where she has a nest. We might have baby wrens, too.”
I had hardly finished my sentence when Grammy exclaimed, “It’s Nini! She was your great grandmother, Frank, and she loved wrens. She always said she would come back as a wren. I’m sure it’s Nini.”
We were all silent for a moment and then Frank said, “You think the wren in the chicken house is my great-grandmother?”
“I’m sure of it,” Grammy replied.
“It’s Nini all right.”
“She always did love wrens,” Granpa added.
Quite truly by the end of that extraordinary day I believed it, too.