Free Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer by Kelly Jones Page B

room. When he asked me how it was, I said it was fine. Dad has enough to worry about. But I’m not going back to 4-H.
    Te extraño mucho,
Soficita
    GRAVENSTEIN INDEPENDENT JOURNAL
    June 24, 2014

    NEW LIFE FOR REDWOOD FARM SUPPLY?
    by Joy Ocampo
    “Unusual chickens have been my life’s work ever since I first worked for Redwood Farm Supply,” said Sue Griegson, who has begun the process to try to buy Redwood Farm Supply and bring the company back to life, putting Gravenstein once again on the poultry map.
    Continued on p. 10

June 26, 2014
    Mr. James Brown
    Wherever you are now
    Dear Great-Uncle Jim,
    I think your chickens are doing okay now. I bet you miss them a lot. I give them new food and water every single morning, even though I need to use a lot of your jars to make sure all the chickens have plenty. There’s a lot of poop too, but it’s no big deal; I just clean it up and put some new straw in. I wish I had another block of straw for when the one in the barn runs out, but I’ll think of something.
    Every morning, I check the nest boxes for eggs. Usually there aren’t any, and that’s kind of disappointing. But this morning there were two eggs in one nest box: one glass one and one light-brown one. I was so excited. I really wished I could show someone. But at least I can tell you about it. Here is a picture of the eggs in the nest box, just for you.

    I hid them in the fridge in one of your old plastic containers. It was for margarine, and you can’t see inside it unless you take the lid off. I don’t think anyone will look in there.
    And I read to them every afternoon. I know they probably don’t understand, but my cousin Lupe wants to be a teacher and she says you’re supposed to read to babies, and they don’t understand either, so I figure it can’t hurt. I haven’t seen that Ms. Griegson lately. Maybe she gave up bothering us.
    I was pretty scared of Buffy until I got Agnes’s letter. Now I know only her chicks could turn things to stone, but still…I don’t have a chicken that can turn stone things back to life, and Agnes didn’t say it wears off. I was pretty surprised you had her at all. But then I thought maybe it’s like zoos. I mean, you need someone responsible to make sure we still have tigers. You wouldn’t want them to go extinct.
    I wish Agnes would tell me more about Buffy. Agnes seems kind of disorganized to be running a chicken business. She has a lot of problems with her typewriter too. You’d think she’d just write things out. But maybe no one can read her handwriting, like with my grandmother.
    When I got Buffy, I got her from a boy who lives near here called Chris who says he knew you. It makes me feel kind of funny, only not really funny, but sad, and maybe a little mad, to think about how he knew you better than I did. Anyway, he came over yesterday. He brought my crate back, and I gave him his. Good thing I’d cleaned it out already. My dad came to find me while I was out making sure Buffy was getting along okay with the other chickens, and he’d brought Chris back with him. I know, I worry about my dad too, sometimes; he’s awfully trusting. You’d think he’d never heard of chicken thieves. Anyway, Chris’s eyes went big and round when he saw Henrietta and the others. But they all had plenty of food and water, so I hoped they would just keep scratching in the dust like regular chickens.
    I figured he probably wanted to make sure his chicken was okay (even though really she was your chicken, and therefore really my chicken). I remember what it felt like when I thought I’d lose Henrietta, and I’d only just met her. So I said hi and tried not to be suspicious or mad, and after Dad went off toward the vineyards, we sat and talked about chickens for a while. Chris told me about poultry shows, where you bring your chickens for everyone to see, and talk about them in front of everybody, and all the kinds of chickens that folks on the farms around here have.