Chapter One

You Come, Too

A path between two garden gates connects Ulisse Aldrovandi and me. Through pasture and woods it winds away into lands where all time and distances have lost meaning.

At one end is Lilyfield Farm, my Pennsylvania home, where the daylilies spill down the hill to Suzanne’s garden of sunflowers and squash, where Sophie the pig wallows by the pear tree, beside the catfish pond. I made the gate to our garden, from old boards adorned with nail holes and knots.

At the other end of the path, a gate of ornate ironwork opens to Aldrovandi’s villa Sampolo, in a valley of the Apennines between Bologna and Florence. Sometimes when the light’s just right, or I’m tired enough, still draped in dreams, I need only step out from my garden, and I stand in the glory of the Italian Renaissance. Whenever he sees me approach, Aldrovandi beckons to me as he would to a lost friend, home at last.

The old botanist delights in showing me what he’s grown, his pomi d’oro and other revelations of a dawning age. As we talk, he cradles a hen in his arms. He tells me about the specimens he’s spent a lifetime collecting from the New World. They would thrive, I say, at Lilyfield. In our gardens, the things that I know, and that he knew, mingle under a sometimes pleasant sun.

Come dream with me this morning in my garden, next to our farmhouse on the road to Valley Forge. The sundial says it’s early still, though shadows only guess at human time. From his roost in the chicken coop down by the barn, the rooster declares another day coming on, but he can wait.

I built the coop myself, of lumber scraps, an old door, and roofing I scavenged. Suzanne designed it. But I made it, rising early each day to hammer away before heading back to Philadelphia to earn my wage as a newspaperman. Today, half a hundred hens have the run of Lilyfield. They peck in pasture and swale, along the pond and amid the stone ruins of the springhouse, though it’s the manure pile they love most, digging deep for the treasures within.

Atop the hill, a weeping cherry shades Suzanne’s grandfather. They planted it together long ago, and there she buried his ashes. I see them planting it now; I hear her crying; he rises for a new season. Here, in this garden, I will scatter her ashes one day to nourish the tomatoes. Or will she scatter mine?

Four seasons I’ve e seen spin past six times since Suzanne and I first kissed at midnight under the willow tree on the far shore of the pond. Seventy moons or more we’ve e counted here together. Peeps turn to pullets, the roosters strut, a summer comes and goes, and another, and we marvel each year at the first eggs. I’ve e learned to admire these creatures, as did Aldrovandi, who has taught me more about them than I ever imagined. And, like him, I loved a hen.

Now each day as I head to work, along a crowded path that’s far better marked than the one that leads to Aldrovandi’s garden, I carry with me a basket of eggs to sell to my newsroom colleagues. Next to me on the seat, the eggs remind me of our lily fields, and of Aldrovandi’s villa in Romagna, and of another Pennsylvania farm that I’d thought was lost to me forever.

Come with me today, into the city and home again. Along the way I’ll tell you a story or two. I’ll tell you about a rooster that survived the chopping block and became a sideshow curio, a headless wonder fed through an eyedropper. I’ll l tell you about a perplexed farmer who found a hen floating lifeless in the pond, and the next day another—until, as the body count grew, the farmer finally cracked this serial killer case.

We’ll parse the thirty or more sentences that researchers suggest chickens can say, and translate some of their talk—the peep’s lonely call or its trill of terror, the hen’s cackle after laying an egg, the rooster’s battle cry and the gentle cluck and coo by which he summons his hens.

We’ll find out why hot young hens tend to go for those bad broiler cocks at first, until they settle for the family guys from the laying breeds. Man, ever curious, has studied such things.

We’ll have questions to ponder: Did an African tribe execute a German explorer in the 1850s near Lake Chad for the crime of eating eggs? Does a rooster have a penis of any consequence? And friend, I will show you hens’ teeth, scarce though they are, and a featherless chicken that, praise be, needs no plucking. Science has given us one. It’s come to this.

The rooster calls us ever onward to the rush hour. We’ll be back at day’s end. Suzanne will take us down to the garden to see what’s ripe, and we can sit amid the arugula and oxhearts and too many weeds, and laugh as loudly as we want, or let the tears come. We’ll watch the chickens finally head home at sunset. Bide with me awhile today, and let’s roost tonight at Lilyfield.

"The quickest way to stop a train is to forget your package," warns the sign near the woodstove in the North Wales, Pennsylvania, station. Next to a folded newspaper, a wicker basket of eggs sits unattended on the bench. Returning from the restroom, I find the stationmaster scowling.

I snatch the contraband and scoot out to board the 7:55 into the city, where I work at The Philadelphia Inquirer and sell farm-fresh eggs to my fellow editors and reporters. I confess to raising chickens. Forty-eight, last count. We are the creatures of Lilyfield Farm—the chickens and I, my lovely wife, Suzanne, our four children on the cusp of adulthood, Sophie the pig, a few horses, three goats, and a peacock. Our five-acre homestead, two centuries old, is midway between Philadelphia and horse-and-buggy Lancaster County.

A man of hayseed roots long urbanized, my life aswirl, I married a city girl gone country and moved five years ago to her oasis near Valley Forge. So many years distant from the Amish-country enclave of my youth, I’d resigned myself to cities, never dreaming that at forty-six I’d be blessed with life and love anew.

I am "the egg man" now, or so I’m known to the coterie of coworkers who have enjoyed the daily produce of my coop these past four years. Each spring, I add a new brood: Silver-Laced Wyandottes and Barred Rocks, Australorps and Araucanas, Brahmas, Rhode Island Reds, and my latest acquisition: Marans, the French marvels that lay eggs the color of rich chocolate. The others lay brown eggs, mostly, a few white, and some green, or rose, or lavender.

I’m hooked. And so are my customers. These eggs sell themselves. I suppose that’s because they come from free-range hens that chase grasshoppers and such. Or because they’re e hormone-free, a source of omega-3, and quite possibly organic, whatever that may mean. Some folks adore the spectrum of colors; others are lured by the brilliant yellow yolks and the heavenly egginess of their taste.

Grocers and restaurateurs have seen the pattern: People want fresh food, locally grown. Consumers who suspect big producers are cruel to chickens take their business to down-to-earth farmers whom they consider kinder and gentler.

Settling into my window seat on the train, I close my eyes as I often do when it’s time to pull away. When next I open them, the world is changing. Outside my window, colors blur as the train slices through rings of suburbia, past old warehouses, new condos, old warehouses becoming new condos, while, sagging in the underbrush, farmhouses molder away as they wait to be bulldozed into profit. Speculators are "developing" old Pennsylvania apace, the countryside underutilized no more.

"Eggs?" asks an overstuffed young woman, a bobbed blonde in black, balancing herself on my seat as she enters the car. She’s grinning at my basket, which is taking up a seat to itself. I allow as to how they are eggs.

"Keeping them all in one basket?" she asks, before lurching onward and away.

My fellow travelers come and go, station to station, caught, like me, in the loop of living. We are migrants still: rural to urban to suburban and rural and back, swaying on the track, trying to get home.

"In Milan, first thing we do, see, is get up and go down to the henhouse and suck us a few right there," offers a gentleman across the aisle who clearly has known Italy, his hands enacting this long-ago memory. "We poke the end and suck ’em, right there in front of the hens." He pauses, his eyes in distant mirth, and tells me this again.

A man who carries around a basket of eggs must expect to hear about such egg-sucking exploits and more. There’s a coop, it seems, in most everyone’s childhood, where we helped a tottering grandpa fetch the eggs on misty mornings; where grandma, apron bespattered, swung her ax wildly in gleeful pursuit of supper.

On the train, as the scenery changes from field to factory, from sprawl to high-rise, I hear how it was once: in Italy or Indiana, in Puerto Rico or Pennsylvania.

And I hear how it is now. I discover others like me, who keep coops: on small farms, in backyards, and even in the city, on rooftops. Speeding through North Philly, I look out upon lines of row houses, or what once were row houses. Next to the El tracks at Eighth and Poplar, a patch of green: A dozen youths have turned an eyesore of trash and tires into a garden of tomatoes and eggplants, lavender and sunflowers, as part of a city program to break through years of encroaching ugliness. I imagine chickens lurking in these neighborhoods, as dispossessed and determined as the greenery amid the rubble.

I lean back and close my eyes again, contemplating other gardens. I think of our patch at Lilyfield—each year we vow to devote the time to tame the weeds, and each year life gets in the way, though the garden blesses us regardless. And I think of Aldrovandi’s garden at Sampolo, perfectly...