Last Monday around 10 o’clock in the morning, I was unloading the dishwasher when I heard a knock at the front door. I opened it to find my five-year-old son thrusting a headless, naked chicken up toward my face. I wasn’t really surprised. I knew that “Blanca” was on her way out. The kids and I had been out a few hours earlier to milk the goats and heard a ruckus up in the yard. “Sasha,” the border-collyish mutt that we’ve had too long to get rid of has adjusted amazingly to farm life. She loves to run through the tall weeds collecting burrs in her thick fur and amuses herself catching mice and voles outside our back door. She has even learned that we do not want her to catch the chickens.  So, despite her hunting instincts, she lounges on the back deck and watches a dozen or more chickens busily pecking around “her” yard–most of the time. As we rounded the corner, the feather evidence revealed that our favorite little snow-white hen had been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the urge to pounce had gotten the better of Sasha. We were very mad at Sasha. Just the week before we had pronounced “Blanca” our Mascot (this was because the chicken on our logo is white and she was the only all-white of our 40 or so birds), and we’d had high hopes of her “representing” our egg-layers for years to come. Now she lay limply in Micaiah’s arms with a broken neck. “We’ll have to butcher her,” I said, and even Ana (3 yrs.) accepted the news matter-of-factly, because death on a farm should not be wasted. Lucky for me, Nana happened over the hill about that time–rolling her “Waste Movers” can down the long gravel driveway toward the road. My mother grew up on a chicken farm, and is much less squeemish about cutting heads off than I still am. Besides which, I had goats to milk! So we strung up Blanca, and Nana did the deed (which was truly a kindness at that point). Soon my firefighter husband was home from work to finish up with his boy. Then came the mid-morning delivery, and I said to myself, “Boy we’ve come a long way!”–not so much because two years ago at this time we were living in a cute little neighborhood in the city where Greg worked as a computer programmer, as because this chicken actually looked remarkably like the ones I used to purchase in the store (and quite unlike our first mangled attempt). So I filled a pot with water, and that afternoon the kids and I made egg noodles from scratch for the first time. When we sat down to dinner we recounted where all the ingredients had come from (ie–back yard, garden, farmer’s market), and we knew that our dreams were coming true.