My heart catches on the quiet of this place,
and I have the sensation that I have stepped back into my life

By Ma. Eugenia Guerra

Should you elect to keep reading, you'll come across the original Santa María Journal I turned in to Tom earlier this month as "The Christmas chicks," which is not about a rogue band of Yuletide women showing up at the ranch.
It's the day's end at the end of the week on the tail end of a damp cold front that blew through, day one past the full moon that last night cast deep blue shadows across the ranchlands.
There's been something about this day and much of yesterday, something to do with the resonance of conversations and recent correspondence and with feeling perhaps that for the last year I've been moving slowly in small steps down a road that was new to me. Today, however, I understand the steps I thought were away from my center were really just the steps back in an arc so wide I never saw the ellipse.
I'm not explaining myself very well, when what I'd like to say is that I've felt some subtle pop of the cosmic clutch changing gears to make me a more productive human being. My writer's heart is fairly bursting with ideas for stories. Now to make the time to set the stories to form, to a novel, to a book.
Just after sundown on a Sunday spent at my desk in Laredo, I step onto the ranchland floor from the reverberating sound chamber of the truck where I've listened to every word of Springsteen's "Everything is everything that you're missing."
For the moment, my heart catches on the quiet of this place, and I have the sensation that I have stepped back into my life.
There in the winter smell of a monte botanical system singed by a couple of mild frosts, I can distinguish the fragrance of damp earth, the blessing of last week's soft drizzles that left a welcome deposit in the ground. There in that familiar and comforting smell, I feel how good it is to be one soul on this expanse of earth.
The moon has yet to rise but the sky is bright and I am able to get to some water and feed chores without a flashlight. Chico the red heeler accompanies me to the tack room, so effusive about being out of his yard that he sort of skids to a stop on the old wooden floor and then gathers himself to begin running in those big breathless circles that heelers run, and I wonder, "Chico, what were you listening to before I showed up?"
I do my chicken and baby chick head count and feed and water them all, stooping through gallinero doorways so short that even I can be beaned by the doorframe. The eggs that hatched the baby chicks were fertilized by Rick's grandmother's rooster, as evidenced by tufts of new feathers that have replaced their birth suit of down.
I put Chico back in the fenced yard of my parents' house and I let the big dogs out, the Ridgeback and the Labrador, enjoying a little play with them. This is done carefully, for they could easily take out my knees in a happy, slobbery moment of frolic. I was remembering their escandalo a few nights ago. They had first treed something in the mesquite outside my kitchen and then whatever it was, something with long nails, made a pounding leap onto the metal roof of my house. At 3 a.m., it sounded like a wrestler trying to stay upright on six-inch heels. Its creepy, scratchy toe-hold in runs from one end of the house to the other were echoed by the dogs' paws pounding on the earth outside my bedroom. The Ridgeback stretches almost six feet from extended fore paws to extended back paws. When he began a series of full body slams against the tall, narrow kitchen window in his effort to reach the eaves and the intruder, I grabbed flashlight and pistol to see what the ruckus was, like I can even see at 3 a.m. without my glasses or would have judgement at that hour.
I never saw the critter, but as I surveyed my roofline in the narrow beam of the flashlight, I sure could imagine him being pushed by the chase up the safe haven of the chimney and then down into my kitchen hearth. Imagination is a wicked thing, though sometimes a good distraction. I moved quickly to secure the rest of the house from the possible entry of the varmint, closing the kitchen door and imagining the havoc that could ensue.
The chaos died down and I think the varmint left when I called the dogs to the gate, no doubt making a mental note to himself to always skip this place on subsequent forays from the pond.
The Christmas chicks
I had been keeping an eye on the two sleek, black Minorcan hens that shared a nest over what seemed to me to be an impossible number of many-colored eggs. They were seriously unapproachable about letting me take an egg count, puffing up and acting like they'd as easily pluck out my eye as let me near the pile of eggs they straddled with such diligence and tenacity.
I admired their efforts and did not want to disturb them, but with colder weather just ahead I couldn't imagine much of a survival rate in the big, drafty chicken house where they had made their nest.
A couple of days before Christmas, with the armor of a denim jacket, leather gloves, and glasses that completely covered my eyes, I called up my courage to withstand a pecking and the calamitous din of alarmed clucking. I swooped up both mothers at once and carried them to the smaller hen house that has electricity. It's the brood house I use to grow out baby chicks, a small space for little people and tiny fowl. I had already prepared a fresh nest in one of the laying boxes and quickly filled it with the still warm eggs. The two mothers had strutted and flown all around me, eyeballing the relocated nest as they filled the airspace with outrage, indignation, and notice of impending peril if things didn't shake out right.
A couple of clucks later, they were on the nest, and oh, the blessed silence as they returned to the task that I had interrupted for perhaps four minutes.
On my barnyard rounds on Christmas morning I was greeted by a chorus of "Cheeps!" and one stray "Cheep!" from a chick that had fallen from the elevated nest. Neither Minorca was happy about the fallen chick or my presence near their shared and newly hatched brood. Hastily, and using a large coffee can as a hooded confine to separate their fierce pecking beaks from me, I moved each mother hen into the anteroom of the henhouse while I relocated the beautiful little brood of 14 chicks to a nest I had made quickly on the floor. Minutes later, there was a great reunion of the two mothers and downy chicks, half of which were solid black and half which bore the brown and tan markings of an Araucana.
What a wonderful gift I'd been allowed to view that morning, the miracle of life on a backdrop of hay and old wood that was shelter against the weather, two sisters sharing the task of hatching and now the maternal nurture of warmth and protection.
Though I've had a small hand in keeping this odd family together, I'm still considered the enemy. When I come in daily with fresh water and chick starter feed, the Minorca mothers rise from their wide nest to rush at me with warnings of impending harm, and the baby chicks scatter in a liquid net of tiny legged magic around them.
I'm only just recounting a story here. Nothing about the real story as it unfolded before my eyes was lost on me -- the sister hens working in tandem as mothers, the sanctity of nests and homes, the instinct to protect and nurture that whose birth you engendered, survival against withering odds.