On Friday, I spent seven hours treasure hunting the fields of the Brimfield Flea Market, and I didn’t see even a quarter of the booths.

There was excitement in the air. That one special object that you’ve been searching for might be around the corner. Or, you might fall in love with something that you don’t even know exists until the moment that you see it.

It’s the sort of place where total strangers chat with you. There are a lot of quirky characters. Most are delightful.

I do, however, give a wide berth to the men smoking cigars. And don’t vendors realize they lose business if their stock smells of cigarette smoke?

When I sat at a picnic table to have lunch, a man eating across from me told me all about his obsession, which is something called pulled glass. Despite the zillions of things displayed at Brimfield, it was all that he looked for. He was like a bloodhound on the trail.

The weather was perfect. It was the sort of cool, breezy, and sunny day that makes putting up with everything else that New England throws at us worthwhile. It put most everyone in a good mood.

Of course, there are always exceptions.

I didn’t come home with much, just a few old farming magazines and two egg cups. It was a very pleasant day.

Labor Day is a holiday of contradictions. It celebrates work, and yet it is a day of rest. It comes at the end of the vacation season when the weather is usually hot and summery, and yet it marks a return to the daily grind and school. In rural, northern regions, labor day comes at the end of the vegetable harvest and points to the coming of harsh weather. These days, we rarely think about the politics behind this holiday. I don’t, but I do think about the different types of labor – the work we do to bring in paychecks to support ourselves, the hard work it takes to maintain even a small garden and home, the never-ending drudgery of necessary daily chores, and the most complex of all, the labors of love.

When you have animals, you can’t take an entire day off. Perhaps you can slow down a bit, put the animals out to pasture, top off their water buckets, and go on a picnic. But your time away is limited. Unlike the two in this photo, my animals aren’t necessities. If I didn’t have the chickens and goats, I’d still have food on my table. So, I have the choice to work as I do. It’s a choice that I feel privileged to be able to make.

In children’s books, roosters say cock-a-doodle-doo! and hens say cluck!. At least, that’s the way that chicken talk is written in most American storybooks. There are plenty of variations, from buk-buk to chuck-chuck – sort of like regional dialects of chicken language. I’d never seen tac-cut written down until I came across this coffee can that is now in my collection. I keep pens in it on my bedside table. It’s a charming image to wake up to. Said out loud, tac-cut tac-cut does sound like a hen clucking. Was the coffee named for the sounds, or did some adman come up with the hen logo with the  thought that the brand name sounded like a hen clucking?

There are plenty of coffee cans with images or roosters crowing wake-up calls, but this is the only one that I know of with a hen.

In any event, I’ve been collecting what hens say around the world. I’m told that in Turkey, a chicken says biak-bik-bik, and that in the the Dominican Republic a flock sounds like this: cocoteeecoco. What do hens say in your neck of the world?

Twiggy, my white leghorn, is quite the character. She’s a lean, flashy, white and red streak. You might catch sight of her in the nesting box  – briefly – while she lays. Right after, though, she jumps up. stands in the pop door, loudly announces her achievement and goes back to zipping around the yard. Her vivacious personality would be enough to convince me to keep her around, but a hundred years ago, farmers switched to white leghorns because of how many eggs they laid.

Imagine going from keeping utility birds, that laid 100 eggs per year, to this.

All of a sudden, instead of chickens being animals that ate scratch and occasionally brought in a little money, a farmer could make a living off of a flock. He or she (and yes, there were many women poultry farmers) could specialize. With little land, and a minimal investment, a person could start an egg farm. This photo was taken in the 1920s when people had hen fever.

For awhile it seemed as if keeping leghorns on pasture was a way to the good life. Soon enough, though, the economic landscape changed, and refrigeration, trucking, antibiotics and caged systems altered everything. Fortunately, the white leghorn did not disappear. Mine doesn’t provide a livelihood, but she is supplying the eggs for a frittata for dinner tonight, which is a good life for both of us.

Siouxsie died this morning. I found her on the floor of the coop. The other hens ignored her body, which is how they usually react when one of them passes on. I was not surprised to find her dead. Actually, I’d expected to find her gone well before now. For a year she’s had stretches of labored breathing. She was a regular layer of medium-sized white eggs, but she often looked stressed before laying. Yesterday I noticed her flagging her tail in discomfort and gasping. But, she continued to move about and eat, and at night she roosted with the rest of the flock.

If her distress was new I would have given her an epsom salt soak. But, I’ve already applied my Spa Treatment to her a number of times. If a hen doesn’t perk up and stay recovered afterwards, then there is likely a serious underlying condition. I don’t believe in prolonging the lives of hens who are diseased. I’ve learned how to do necropsies. I’ve opened up enough birds to know that they can live a long time with horrible ailments and are likely suffering for longer than we realize.

This afternoon I did a necropsy on Siouxsie. As always, what I found inside was unexpected. She was the first older hen (Siouxsie was four and that counts as aged) that I’ve examined that was not tumorous. She was also the first with a functioning ovary with developing yolks. She had an egg, fully formed with the shell, halfway down her reproductive tract. Yesterday she tried to lay it, but could not. Did that make her “egg bound?” The assumption is that an egg bound hen has a stuck egg, and with help (massage, bath, oil, poking with a finger) it will come out and all will be fine. I think that those assumptions are usually far from the truth, and doing the necropsy confirmed my belief that there was much wrong inside of Siouxsie, and that it was a kindness to let her pass on.

The first thing that I found inside of Siouxsie was a thick layer of yellow fat on her right side. When a chicken has an uneven distribution of fat, then something is wrong with her metabolism. The fat, itself, will cause laying difficulty as it takes up space needed for the egg to move easily through the reproductive tract. Worse yet for Siouxsie, was what I found on her left side. There was a mass that looked like two white water balloons fused together, which were filled with what looked like yellow custard. It was the size of her drumstick and taking up precious space inside of her body cavity.

I’ve seen similar masses before, although none exactly like the one in Siouxsie. The reproductive tract is not a closed system. There is a gap between the ovary and the long tube that the forming egg moves through. When a yolk is released from the ovary, it must be caught by the infandibulum to begin its journey and development. If the egg material misses the entrance to tthe tract, you have what is called an internal layer. I’ve seen the body cavity filled with solidified yolks, with jelled whites, and with infected fluids. Siouxsie’s mass wasn’t anchored to anything, and it hadn’t broken up and caused peritonitis (infection of the bodily fluids) and so she must have survived for awhile with discomfort, but without it totally obstructing her bodily functions. Perhaps the mass shifted. Perhaps combined with the body fat there was no way an egg could pass. Perhaps it was something else. My necropsies are crude – I don’t sent tissue samples to a lab and I am still learning to identify disease. In any event, what is clear is that it is a good thing that she passed peacefully away today and did not seem to suffer.

Siouxsie was an infuriating bird. She had no chicken sense, no sense whatever, really, not even a sense of direction. She was the only hen who didn’t come when called. She attacked other hens and had no sense about when to back down from a fight, or even have any sense of why she was fighting in the first place. While the other hens kept their external parasites at bay with dust baths and grooming, Siouxsie needed applications of louse powder. She didn’t know enough to come in from freezing rain. Her top knot needed trimming in order to keep her dry, and so that she could see where she was going. Infuriating. Sometimes, though, the most ridiculous characters are the most fun to have around. She will be missed. But, no, I will not be getting another Polish for the flock.