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upbringing
True Stories of an Irish Upbringing and Other
lies by Dan Daneen
Price $ 17.00>> 
 Eggs!
If they did not live in the heart of a city, most Irish families
had chickens and/or ducks. We were no exception to this
rule. Over the years my mother nurtured many kinds of
chickens and ducks. Periodically forgetting the havoc the
previous invasions had caused to the social well-being of the
family, she launched into geese. The presence of these birds was
mostly for the production of eggs rather than birds for the table.
Chickens were always kept in a “hen run or hen house.” On the
other hand, ducks and geese were allowed to roam freely
wherever they liked. This gave the ducks and geese unlimited
scope in where they deposited their contributions to the fertilizing
of the garden. These birds showed an amazing understanding of
human movement that allowed them to position their contribution
where they would cause the most inconvenience to passersby.
Seldom a day passed without someone transferring “duck do”
from outside our house to inside. One gets almost used to it after
a few decades. The similarity between our front steps and a
duck toilet never escaped me, but ducks and unfortunately,
geese (They are bigger!) think there is no better place for some
obscure reason.
All these birds came to us in the form of eggs! My mother did not
believe in incubators so we were subjected to a procession of mother
hens, which in Ireland are called “clocking” or “broodie” hens.
This clocking name relates to the call they use first to warn people
away from their nests and later to signal their family. Once a hen
starts to clock, she will not lay any more eggs for a couple of
months, so clocking hens are passed around freely to neighbours
and are usually considered well out of the way. The secret was to
obtain a sitting of eggs and a clocking hen simultaneously. Once
my mother had achieved this, they were installed in the stables
in a box that in a previous life had carried oranges from Israel.
The first milestone of this event was at two weeks when my mother
made a night visit with a flashlight to the hen to see how many
of the eggs were fertile. The unfertile eggs were removed and served
the next morning in the form of scrambled eggs for breakfast...
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