Life Sketches by Terry Berkson

Green Eggs and Hmmm…

More than 20 years ago, to legitimize calling our new home in the hills on the west side of Canadarago Lake a farm, we drove over to King’s Auction in West Winfield and bought a dozen hens and a rooster. When I described the chickens, six Rhode Island reds and six New Jersey blacks, to my friend, Charlie, back in Brooklyn, he said, “Sounds like you bought a couple of hockey teams.” The rooster was a very polite white leghorn who, when I’d refill the feeder, would always let the ladies eat first.

A dozen hens and a rooster don’t make a very impressive farm operation. Nevertheless, friends back in Brooklyn were calling us pioneers. I had originally wanted to buy some heifers, but I’d have to build fences and Alice, my wife, said that if I put any more energy into anything but fixing up the house, she was leaving.

So, besides carpentry, plumbing, and painting, I busied myself each morning feeding and watering the chickens and spreading a fresh layer of straw in the coop. For several weeks I was gathering as many as 10 or 12 brown eggs a day until one late morning three of the eggs I collected turned out to be green. I thought maybe it was because of all the dandelion leaves the chickens were eating when I’d let them out to free range, but neighbors assured me that eating weeds wouldn’t do that. There were only three green eggs and, after that, all the eggs in my daily basket went back to being a normal brown. I suspected that a friend had played a prank, but weeks passed and no one came forward with a laughing confession.

Meanwhile, Charlie from Brooklyn, who’s an antique and collectable dealer, sent me a 1941 Eshelman’s poultry and feed facts book which, he said, “has everything you need to know about raising chickens.” What I learned from the book was that the color of a chicken’s ear and not what she eats determines the color of the egg. To be sure of that, I phoned Roger Vaughn from Vaughn’s Hatchery just outside of town and told him about the green eggs. He said that someone had definitely placed them there, that there was no way reds or blacks would make green eggs.

I was thinking about who could have put those green eggs in my coop. There had been a lady from Skyland Farm in West Exeter at the Thursday farmers’ market earlier that summer. She told me she had Araucana chickens that laid green eggs. Coincidentally, her booth at the market was right next to a woman I like to call The Puffball Lady. She likes to collect the giant, spherical, white mushrooms for her husband, who considers them a delicacy. I almost caused her to have a heart attack by telling her young son that he had to sneak up on a puffball. I did this to quiet the boy so that he, my son and I would have a peaceful walk in the woods—while looking for puffballs. My fabrication backfired when The Puffball Lady later “sicced” her son on a puffball that was sitting on “Posted” property. When near the prize, the boy dropped down on all fours and slowly headed for the mushroom as the puzzled Puffball Lady began to tear at her hair. I think, to get even for my misinforming her son, she bought some of those green eggs and had her husband drive up to the farm on his four-wheeler and salt my coop with them.

Now, I was going to have to find a nice puffball and place the temptation out in a forbidden “No Trespassing” pasture, maybe one where there’s a nice big bull grazing, and the Puffball Lady will no doubt see it and again go through the same “son-crawling” anxiety of having to poach it for her beloved husband.

To bend an old saying, revenge is best served on a green pasture.

Terry Berkson’s articles have appeared in “New York” magazine, “Automobile” magazine and many others. His memoir, “Corvette Odyssey,” has received many good reviews: “highly recommended with broad appeal,” says “Library Journal.”