Virgil Hervey
Articles by Virgil Hervey
November 24, 2010
On Thanksgiving day, the old man would pack us into the ´37 Plymouth and we´d head off down Eastern Parkway to Bushwick for dinner at my grandparent´s. Once we left Queens, there were no trees.
November 24, 2010
For some reason, as the dog scampered down the stairs from our back deck, the groundhog failed to perceive the danger and was slow to respond.
November 24, 2010
We are into the days of declining amounts of daylight. Chickens need about 12 hours of light to make an egg. Production always goes down in fall and winter. Some of them are molting. They stop laying for a few weeks when they molt. Then, it rained yesterday. Less light, cold and wet – it had to make them miserable. I know it did me. And there was the dog.
September 07, 2010
When Harry Kresge awoke, he found he wasn´t in his own bed; his head hurt and his mouth was full of cotton; he was naked and the naked woman next to him wasn´t his wife. She felt different, smelled different. He couldn't remember what happened the night before that led to this scenario.
August 29, 2010
We thought we needed an excuse to borrow our daughter's dog. So, we would tell her that we wanted to establish a pooch presence to trick our resident groundhog, Allen Street Al, into thinking we had a dog, so he would move away. Al wasn´t fooled. But, yesterday, Rhesus finally came through in the groundhog department and it wasn´t pretty.
August 15, 2010
We lost a Barred Rock in the heat wave this week.
August 11, 2010
I didn´t have an oil spill to deal with – just my stepdaughter´s wedding. "You´re going to have to handle this," Amy told me early on. "I´m too busy to deal with it." You writers out there will recognize this attitude – the "since you´re not doing anything" syndrome. And me, the least likely person to handle wedding arrangements…
July 18, 2010
The dog likes it here. He likes to make runs at the fence to Chickenland to scatter the chickens. He has been over a couple times. Whenever he is here, the groundhog that plagues us is nowhere to be seen. Whenever the dog is here, no matter what issue is weighing heavily on my wife's shoulders at the time, she is suddenly euphoric.
July 18, 2010
The play we were rehearsing involves the two main characters sitting in lawn chairs pondering their lives and rising occasionally to assist fair goers with parking their cars. The mother cat, who had taken to Jerry, jumped in his lap and made herself comfortable every time he sat down. And every time he stood up, dislodging her, she would hop back up and curl up in his vacated seat. So, he had to remove her each time he was supposed to sit back down. While all this was going on, one of her kittens climbed a tree and was now overhead mewing because she was frightened. In between, the mother would hiss at the hapless male, because she thought he was getting too close to another one of her kittens.
July 16, 2010
Here´s how I got the news. I returned home in the early evening from a faculty reading at the Writers´ Workshop. I opened the door and was greeted with, "I´ve got some bad news for you." By the way, this is always the way that the last thing I want to hear is delivered. I wish she could be more creative.
"What is it?" I moaned.
"Your ice cream melted," she said.
"What are you trying to tell me – that the refrigerator is broken?"
July 09, 2010
I already had three different e-book management programs on my computer, but Calibre was clearly the most sophisticated. However, since my Sony Reader uses the e-pub format, which is the most readily available, it didn´t seem to matter that I could convert formats, except in one very important instance; important to a news junkie, that is. Calibre has links to over 350 Internet news sites, where it can go to retrieve (in many instances) entire newspapers, convert them to your format and download them onto your reader. Some of these news sources require a paid subscription, but most of them are free and take only about two minutes each to download.
July 05, 2010
Finding and returning twelve frightened chickens to their coops in the dark is going to be a problem and, to complicate matters, the Fourth of July fireworks at the nearby park are due to start any minute.
June 28, 2010
For the next fifteen minutes the three of us were totally engaged with watching the spider as it moved from the box onto the table top where it explored everything on the surface before returning to the exact spot where it had started. The more I watched, the more I became convinced that this was a very special little spider, more intelligent than your average eight-legged creature. If I got close enough, I could see its mouth moving, as if it was constantly tasting the air. Sometimes it would move slowly and at others it would dart from place to place, covering ground so quickly it didn´t seem possible for something so small.
June 26, 2010
In the last email I got from my cousin, a few years ago, she shared her elation over her "marriage" to her female partner. It was at the height of the hubbub surrounding efforts to get states to change their laws regarding gay weddings, and she and her lover had gone to Canada and got married. She wanted me to be happy for her, but in return she got silence. I suppose I could have said, "Congratulations!" or "I am happy for you." But I had nothing to say.
June 18, 2010
I look out back and spy two baby groundhogs greeting each other. One of them is wagging its tail like a dog. They are happy to see each other. I step out onto the deck and they split in opposite directions, one of them going under our deck, presumably into the burrow along the foundation. Apparently, they are already on their own as no parents are in sight. So much for the super-sonic groundhog chaser I installed.
June 07, 2010
Visions of a bird flu epidemic danced in my head as I slipped into my galoshes and hurried out to get a better look. Indeed, it was a bird. Now I was giving chase, but the young Barred Rock that had the dead sparrow by the neck wasn´t about to give it up.
May 31, 2010
For the past week or two we kept finding Ruby in the backyard outside of the fenced off area we call Chickenland. It seemed almost as if she were coming and going as she pleased. We started pointing fingers: Who let her out? Who wasn´t fast enough with the gate? Who didn´t take a head-count when locking them up at night, after we had let them play in the yard? None of these accusations seemed to hold water, but there was no evidence of an escape route per se. The only hole under the fence between Chickenland and our yard was too small to accommodate her stature. Or so it seemed.
May 25, 2010
Ebooks are the wave of the future. I have even heard a report about one school that issued readers to all it's students and then shut down the school library. I wish they had come along with these sooner, like when I was in college. It holds more books than I have owned in my entire lifetime.
May 25, 2010
In my enthusiasm for disposing of grass clippings by depositing them in our chicken run, it seems that I was dumping too much of the stuff. The practice seemed harmless enough for the first two weeks until it started to rain and rain and rain.
May 15, 2010
One night at 3:00 a.m. a few years ago, I went out on the deck with a flashlight and shone it out by the coops. The place was teeming with wildlife: skunks, opossum, raccoons, and who knows what else. A couple years ago, raccoons tore the air vents off one of my coops and reached in, trying to grab the chickens. You can imagine the panic that caused in the coop in the middle of the night.
May 07, 2010
At first, Amy was doubtful about all the care I put into raising this bunch. She wanted to cut the heat lamp off early; she wanted to get them out of the house as soon as possible; she wanted to merge them with the flock before they were ready. Now, as she sees the size of them and how healthy they are, when she counts the eggs every day, she acknowledges that we did it right this time, and if we ever do it again, we should do it the same way. Be patient, keep them warm, and give them lots of love. Raise them right and you will be rewarded.
April 28, 2010
Besides hawks, raccoons, and the like, one reason we exiled our flock to a secure chicken run in a back corner of our yard was to keep them from destroying our lawn. Chickens love grass. Not only do they scratch at it; they eat it. I suspect, as in the case with cats, they actually need some grass in their diet every now-and-then.
April 19, 2010
All week long, our little broody hen has been sitting on the eggs of the other hens.
April 11, 2010
It always seems to be the banty hens that want to sit on eggs; their own, or others. They have the reputation of being good brooders and good mothers. This can be a good thing if you have fertile eggs you want hatched out. But if you don´t, broody behavior is disruptive to the entire flock, and makes it difficult to retrieve eggs from the coop.
April 04, 2010
The chickens watch me through the big glass sliding doors as I move about in the house, waiting for that moment when I will open the back door and emerge with some fat and gristle I have cut from a steak, left over pasta with spaghetti sauce, water melon rinds...
March 28, 2010
These chickens you have loved and cared for so much can be incredibly cruel. I have seen one of my favorite girls hold down another chicken and peck at her unmercifully. It´s like watching your children fight - it hurts to watch.
March 21, 2010
Over the first few weeks your chicks will grow from cute little fuzz balls to awkward looking, skinny, long-legged adolescents. During this time, you should be getting ready for you next stages of housing, as they will soon outgrow their original quarters.
March 14, 2010
The best place to purchase chicks is at a hatchery. They are experts at determining the sex of day old chicks and they guarantee them to be healthy. If you buy chicks at the flea market, you will probably get four roosters out of every batch of six chicks. That´s fine if you like roosters. But if you want egg layers, you are bucking the odds.
March 07, 2010
I remember the first time we bought six chicks. We didn´t have a clue. Once we had them home we had to scramble to set up to care for them. So, if you are thinking about starting a flock for the first time, I advise doing some research and preparation before hand, as you would if you were about to bring home a new baby. Be prepared!
February 28, 2010
Girl meets chicken. Girl loses chicken. Girl finds chicken again.
February 22, 2010
I let the messages in my Yahoo spam file for my Gunch Press account build up for three weeks. During that time, it accumulated 125 messages. Most of them from "dear friends" calling for an urgent reply.
February 21, 2010
It didn´t take long for my chickens to find the bare stretch of dry, dusty earth that had been exposed by the beating sun melting away the snow next to the house. First they scratched around for bugs and ate the leaves off the bushes, and then they formed a big pile of writhing fowl covering themselves with dirt.
February 13, 2010
Winter is not a fun time for chickens and those that care for them. I feel guilty every time I foil one of their attempts to escape the coop while I´m filling their feeders and changing their water.
February 06, 2010
If you want a chicken to lay in a certain place, the best way to convince her is to show her that another chicken thought it was a good place. I have used fake eggs, real eggs and hard-boiled eggs to trick them into laying where I wanted them to. People have even been known to use golf balls.
January 30, 2010
When people jokingly ask me if we get green eggs from our chickens, they are surprised when the answer turns out to be yes. Then, of course they want to know if they taste better than regular eggs.
January 23, 2010
On frigid winter mornings when I have to go out to Chickenland and feed them and bring them hot water, when I have to go out there every single night and take a head count and lock them up, when I have to shovel out their filthy coops and refill them with fresh straw, I think there may be some deep-seated psychological reason for torturing myself so. I can´t be doing it just for the eggs. If you add up all my expenses, these have to be the most expensive eggs in the world.
January 18, 2010
Who are the real baby-boomers? In my book, it´s those born in the last year or two of the war through those born in the following decade. The real baby boomers were born from 1943-1953. We grew up watching "Howdy Doody" and "Ozzie and Harriet," not "Captain Kangaroo" and "Sesame Street." We experienced the dawn of rock and roll, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Women´s Liberation and the sexual liberation that followed – together.
January 16, 2010
We lost the Barred Plymouth Rock we called Rocky in the cold of last winter in a manner very similar to the way we lost the Blue Cochin we called Sloopy, just last week. The older chickens don´t seem to handle the cold as well as the younger ones. And it seems that once they have started to succumb, even bringing them into the warmth of your home can´t save them.
January 09, 2010
Once it started getting really cold, I noticed that nine of our thirteen hens were sleeping in one coop, and only four in the other. I laugh when I go out there with a flashlight to lock them in for the night. Nine pairs of beady eyes follow my every move as I make my head count. And someone usually has something to say.
January 03, 2010
What do chickens eat? They eat just about anything, even broken glass.
December 25, 2009
I used to think I was a bad husband, but a good father. Recently, I have come to the conclusion that you can´t be one without the other. We get busy with our own lives. We are self-absorbed, preoccupied and our kids suffer. It´s no wonder the children of the baby-boomers are so screwed up. They will be the first generation to be less educated than their parents. As a nation, we are going backwards. It´s because of fathers like me. I am finally ready to admit it.
December 19, 2009
Chickens are the most selfish, jealous, heartless species I know of. It starts as soon as they are hatched. Chickens don´t share, unless there is more than they can manage to hoard. The hen at the top of the pecking order gets to eat first. Chickens that are newly merged into the flock are usually bullied for weeks. The older chickens will block the door of the coop at dusk in order to keep the little ones out. Many times, I have pulled one angry chicken off another in what closely resembled the schoolyard fights of my childhood at PS 97 in Queens. I have on occasion found chickens with bloodied combs as they sat laying and refusing to vacate the egg-laying box at the behest of an impatient sister.
December 12, 2009
It´s tough getting rid of roosters. Most animal shelters already have too many. In too many cases people just abandon unwanted roosters. They assume that if they leave them at some farmer´s gate, they will be taken in. But that is not usually the case. Frequently, they become prey to a hawk, raccoon or the farmer´s dog, before anyone even knows they are there. In that case it would actually be less cruel to make dinner out of them.
December 05, 2009
Usually, when one of our chickens slips out if the gate is left ajar, she can´t wait to get back in with the flock. If they can´t get back in, they will pace up and down the fence, looking longingly at their friends and crying. If I purposely let them out into the bigger yard, I can count on them going home when the sun sets. But this one little orange bantam pullet was giving us fits.
December 02, 2009
I was happy as a lark when I downloaded Kindle for PC software from Amazon.com for free recently, then purchased a bestseller for ten bucks. As happy as I was, I kept poking around. I figured there must be some free reading material out there somewhere. Well there is - books in the hundreds of thousands. The software to read these books is also available for free. And it works pretty good.
November 28, 2009
As winter approached in the first year of my first flock, I began to worry how my chickens would survive. I didn´t have a clue. "What do others do?" I wondered. I had built a secure coop, with double-paned windows and vents that close, but still, it didn´t seem sufficient. It was just uninsulated plywood construction – kind of like a cabin in the woods, but with no stove.
November 21, 2009
If you have six chickens that are in the productive stage of their life (six months to four years) you will be getting on average about four eggs a day. This will vary according to the seasons as they need about 12 hours of light to produce an egg. In summer, with six chickens and a family of four, you will be amazed at how fast the eggs pile up. You will have plenty of eggs to give away.
November 17, 2009
We have been raising chickens in our backyard for over five years. We currently have 13 hens of all descriptions. What I have learned over the years is that after the first couple months, they are pretty easy to care for, as long as you can keep them safe from predators.
November 04, 2009
As I read the marker at the site in Point Pleasant, West Virginia where the Sliver Bridge once stood, I couldn´t help but wonder what the townsfolk think about the connection that has been drawn to the Mothman sightings. Forty-plus years later, many of them are still suffering from the loss of loved ones on that cold December night. The bridge memorial makes no mention of the Mothman. And the plaque at the Mothman monument a few blocks away makes no mention of the bridge. Good taste and a sense of reverence dictate that. There are many theories connecting the two events. One is that for a year-and-a-half the residents of Point Pleasant suffered from a mass hysteria that came to an end when a terrible tragedy brought them all to their senses.
October 24, 2009
If there is one candidate in any of these contests that you think stands head and shoulders above the rest and you are concerned that person might not get elected, your best option is to cast one vote and let the rest of the chips fall where they may.
October 18, 2009
It's beginning to look like "wait until next year" time for the Ohio State Buckeyes. However according to the Mayans, there won't be very many "next years," as the world is due to come to an end in 2012. It could be that yesterday's 24-16 loss to Purdue was an omen that they are correct.
October 07, 2009
One man's argument in favor of Issue Three, the proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution to authorize casinos in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio, on the ballot this November.
September 28, 2009
I should have turned the GPS navigator off, turned around, and followed the detour. Instead, I decided to give my little computerized friend it's head. Big mistake! Soon we were behind a big, smoke-spewing flatbed truck going about five miles-per-hour on a narrow road in the middle of a wasteland of dusty steel yards and factory buildings in Gary, Indiana.
September 22, 2009
This year's winner of the Air Force Marathon learned how to be patient, fight through the pain and exhaustion, and persevere to defeat his opponent in a different arena. His senior year at Ashland University, at the end of a college career that was marked by injury and illness, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin´s disease, a form of lymphatic cancer. For six months, every-other-week, he would return home on Friday to receive chemotherapy and return to school on Sunday night. The running was curtailed for awhile. He started up again just one week after his last treatment.
September 19, 2009
Thinking back on how an insurance company treated his mother after a serious accident, one man has concluded that the last thing one needs to go through at a time like that is dealing with a for-profit health insurance company. The alarmists are warning us about government bureaucracy, he writes, and there was a time that he might have agreed. But after his family´s experience, he is convinced no system could be worse than what we have now.
September 15, 2009
Most Americans will never forget where they were around 9:00 a.m. on September 11, 2001 when the first of two airliners slammed into the side of one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York City. Nor will they ever forget how the event first came to their attention and the hours they spent thereafter watching the real-life horror story unfold. Jim and Betty Felder of Yellow Springs, Ohio were just six days into a three-week long vacation in Europe, in the town of Ulm, Germany, birthplace of Albert Einstein, when an Australian woman on their tour received a cell phone call from her daughter.
Things are looking up for one Ohio village: Yellow Springs, Ohio has a spring in its step these days
September 11, 2009
What keeps the tourists coming to this town 20 miles from Dayton that Rolling Stone magazine once referred to in a published interview with celebrity resident Dave Chappelle as a bohemian enclave? For starters, it has something for everyone. In addition to Chappelle, who has been quoted as saying he will never move away from the village, Rod Serling, John Lithgow, Virginia Hamilton and a dozen other celebrities have called Yellow Springs home. There are two state parks, a thousand acre glen that is part of the Antioch campus, and a pristine bike path that stretches for a hundred miles to the north and south. There are galleries, shops, noted restaurants, coffeehouses, street musicians, and benches every few feet. And there are the residents…
September 06, 2009
Honey is full of surprises. Honey is what I have taken to calling my new GPS navigator. One evening, we were headed to a wedding near Cincinnati. I had a fair idea where the place might be based on the directions that came with the wedding invitation. But, I thought, this would be an opportunity to give Honey her toughest test yet. I won't say she failed. I don't exactly know how to describe what she did.
September 03, 2009
As nonprofits around the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio look for ways to collaborate with one another as a way to deal with the shrinking volunteer pool and add more muscle to their fundraising capabilities, especially for grants and federal stimulus money, partnerships and other kinds of mergers a...
September 02, 2009
In a letter to vendors dated Aug. 28, 2009, but postmarked Aug. 31, Antioch University Vice Chancellor/CFO Tom Faeke was unequivocal that the transfer of assets from the University to an Antioch College Alumni group that was seeking to purchase the college would be a fait acompli on Sept. 4. The sig...
September 01, 2009
In a letter to vendors dated Aug. 28, 2009, but postmarked Aug. 31, Antioch University Vice Chancellor/CFO Tom Faeke was unequivocal that the transfer of assets from the University to an Antioch College Alumni group that was seeking to purchase the college would be a fait acompli on Sept. 4. The sig...
August 31, 2009
Call them pedicabs, bicycle rickshaws, sit-lows... They've got them in New York. They've got them in Seattle. They even have them in Columbus and at The Greene, a huge outdoor mall in Beavercreek, Ohio. And now they are pedaling hard to make it to the already bicycle-friendly town of Yellow Springs,...