Welcome to Chapter Sixteen of my life story, as told through incredible animal encounters ranging from coastal Massachusetts to the plains of Africa to the Alaskan tundra.

Every Wednesday I write and release a new chapter in this unfolding narrative, and I am often as surprised as you are by what comes out on the page. If you’re new here, and would like to catch up, you can find the previous chapters here. However, each one is presented as a stand-alone story, so you can also just dive right in- I trust you’ll put the pieces together on your own.

I have no business having even one of these ridiculous encounters in my cache, let alone several dozen. I know, I know. Alas, this is my life, laid bare for you.

Chapter Sixteen: You Don’t Have to Try So Hard

Ssanje, Uganda, December 2012

One would think, when I look back on my time in Uganda, that I would remember the wild things most of all. The swaying elephants and yawning hippos, the lions lounging in the shade of umbrella trees, the water buffalos with mud dripping from their horns, flaunting cheeky yellow-billed oxpeckers like ornate hats.

I think this is what everyone imagines when they think of Africa, or at least it is what I used to dream of when I was young, buzzing with longing after watching yet another David Attenborough documentary late into the night. I certainly saw all of these incredible creatures, and more, and still, when I close my eyes and imagine myself stepping out of my banda each morning, it is the chickens I remember most of all.

It amuses me to no end that I transplanted myself 8,776 miles from my house in Bellingham to my exotic new abode in Ssanje only to be greeted, once again, by a flock of chickens right outside my door.

At home, we had a small wooden coop with a slanted roof, painted white and green to match the house, with a pleated curtain in the window adorned with daisies. There were eight hens until Anne Boleyn mysteriously disappeared from her roost one night during a windstorm. Mary Queen of Scots grieved her, I’m certain she did, as she refused to leave the coop for days. She was undoubtedly frightened, as one of only seven witnesses to the crime. You never know how you will go, but watching the demise of a friend gets the imagination going, that’s for sure. At least none of our ladies were beheaded, thank goodness. We gave them their ill-omened names in order to prepare ourselves to do what must be done if they had grown into roosters rather than hens, as crowing cocks were strictly prohibited in the city limits (the feathered kind, anyway). But fate decided that Her Majesty Boleyn was destined to die young either way, and we never saw her again.

Every morning, I would open the hinged door first thing and greet them by name, tossing the compost from the previous night’s meal onto the grass, smiling at the way they would chase each other around the yard with their bloomers in a twist, trying to steal zucchini peels right out of the slowest one’s beak. Chickens are the best kind of entertainment.

In Uganda, there were two hundred hens, just about fifty feet from our wooden door, and no coop to speak of- certainly no daisy-printed curtains. They lived in a twenty by twenty foot fenced-in yard with feeding troughs running down the middle and a number of crates and wooden nesting boxes tucked under a makeshift shelter comprised of corrugated metal and some rough wooden beams.

Their job was to lay eggs enough for the village, and one a week for the children. This was a working flock. Certainly, no one thought to name them.

The fence was falling down on the north side, and the peripatetic birds- the nomads, like ourselves- would always jump the saggy chain mail enclosure and escape the yard first thing in the morning. They would peck at my toes while I cooked up a couple of their eggs on the sun-bleached picnic table outside our hut. I would gently nudge them with my foot while firing up the propane heating element, balancing the banged up frying pan just so, the one that had we were told was so wonky because it had been used to smash a giant spider by a pervious guest, causing the aluminum base to bulge up just right of center, which resulted in a scramble that was always simultaneously burned and undercooked depending on where it settled in the pan.

After I ate, I would join a few of the students in feeding the flock, which was a harrowing ordeal. We would fill buckets with feed and enter the coop like a military brigade preparing to subdue a dangerous riot- rushing in, we were immediately assaulted by the squawking masses, landing on our heads and weighing down our buckets, scrambling under our feet and flapping aggressively in our faces. The students would laugh in delight and grab them by the feet, flinging them away, while I would freeze and drop the buckets and cover my eyes, squealing as the kids covered me. They thought this was the funniest thing in the world, and would yell, “Auntie! Just throw them like this!” while demonstrating what looked like an advanced self defense take-down in fits of giggles.

For the life of me, I could not bring myself to throw them or punt them or pin them down. I kept thinking about how, just before we rehomed the hens, Marie Antionette had come down with some sort of bacterial infection and could not even lift her head, and had lost most of her feathers, and I had nursed her back to health. I would pick her up, carefully pinning her wings to her thin frame, and flip her upside down in my lap so that both of her feet curled up in the air and she would look up at me with rheumy eyes as I stretched out one of her wings and found a vein there and injected IV antibiotics and fluids into her little body.

It’s amazing, the trust we can form with those who have no one else to care from them, even and especially if they are frightened, and I often wondered if my whispered words of love reassured her.

Marie made a full recovery, and I cried when I boxed her up and drove her across town several weeks later.

What would the children have thought about a mzungu woman putting a needle in the vein of an ailing chicken- these children who did not have mothers to cradle them when they were ill? Surely, they would have thought I was not right in the head.

It took months for most of the students to warm up to us, but mostly I think this is my fault, because I was afraid of them.

I am not proud of this- that I was afraid of them- but I often stood back when I should have stepped forward. I lingered in doorways instead of folding myself into the circle.

In my mind, they were the ones who were supposed to make the first move. We were strangers there, and did not know our place, but they were children, and now I understand that they also did not know theirs. Visitors were rare, especially white-skinned ones, and none of us knew what to do about this. I thought we would be immediately swarmed by laughing, exuberant children, but this was a cinematic version of events not unlike the David Attenborough documentaries, a carefully edited version of the truth, something perhaps I had picked up in a slide show in my church’s basement when a missionary came to visit.

In reality, the kids were demure, shy, reserved. In the early days, they eyed us with suspicion when we walked through the compound, and I wondered if perhaps they did not like us, but I quickly learned that when I would smile at them and wave, their faces would transform and they would light up and giggle. Some would come up to us then and take our big hands in their little ones and get on bended knee and bow their heads and say “Good morning, Auntie,” or “Good evening, Uncle,” and I would lower myself to my knees as well and look them in the eye and ask their names and try to decipher their shrinking whispers.

Please like me, I would try to say with my eyes. I wanted to envelop them in a hug but I did not, I only smiled and hoped one or the other of us would be less scared.

My deepest regret while living at Sabina Home is that I never helped the youngest of the children, some only four and five years old, scrub the urine from their mattresses every morning.

Again, it’s not that I did not care, it’s only that I did not know my place.

The first time I watched them drag their bedding out of the dorm, I didn’t know what was happening. I stood at the entrance to the courtyard, head cocked, trying to sort out if they were up to some mischief or simply looking to indulge in an early nap in the sun.

Then I saw the dormitory’s house mother, an incredibly industrious woman by the name of Deborah Nakiduuli, hand each of them a bar of soap while a few of the older kids brought over some buckets of water. She patted them on the backs and said something in a fortifying tone while the littles got to work wetting and scrubbing the fresh stains on their mattresses, their little faces pinched in concentration.

There was only one adult assigned to each dorm- a house mother and father- and they were in charge of parenting over a hundred children, aged five to thirteen. Most of the kids were orphans, though some were from families with so many children they could not be cared for and fed at home. It was a privilege for these kids to be attending the school; by Ugandan standards, they were very well taken care of, with three small meals a day and a decent education.

But they all had to learn to be self-reliant from an incredibly young age. Every morning they would pile out onto the lawn and begin their chores for the day, gathering water and washing laundry, and the smallest ones did not get a pass just because they were still of bed-wetting age.

I wonder what would have happened if I had walked with the confidence of a mother towards those babies and taken the soap from their hands? If, instead of lingering in the doorway, I had taken some of the burden off of their tiny shoulders.

What if I had looked them in the eye and whispered loving words of reassurance to them? Would they have been uncomfortable? Would Deborah have put her hands on her generous hips and clucked her tongue? Or would all of their faces have lit right up to see a mzungu woman on her knees?

I can only guess.

When I became a mother, I did not have the experience some women have of ecstatic joy and transcendence at first seeing my baby’s face. I could not make my body stop bleeding and shaking, and she was barely breathing, and I mostly just felt relieved that the relentless waves of pain had suddenly stopped. I had been in labor for 72 hours.

Other people breathed life into her lungs, and gave me injections to keep the blood inside of my body, and after all of that, when I felt like a crushed flower with no further use to the world, she was handed over to me and I did not know what to do with her. I missed the baby in my belly, the one whose slow rolls and rib kicks and frequent hiccups had become so precious and familiar to me. I did not know this howling creature.

She would not nurse and cried the entire second night in the hospital, and I wanted to ask the confident nurse who told me she five of her own children to just take mine away from me until I could google some things and take a long nap and figure out what I was meant to be doing.

She did not do this, much to my dismay, but she did take us out of the room where my husband and mother were trying to sleep on lumpy couches and cots and into a waiting room where there was a long cushioned window seat overlooking a dark garden. She barricaded me into that seat with pillows all around us, and left me with strict instructions not to roll on top of her and not to tell hospital administration that she had broken the rules by allowing us to sleep together. My daughter stopped crying then and we listened to rain hit the glass outside and the heater vent kicked on right beside us and we were wrapped in warmth and I closed my eyes for a moment and felt the delicious weight of her in my arms.

When I opened my eyes, in the quiet, in the dark, she looked up at me and I knew her. I whispered it out loud, “Oh, I know you.” And I put her to my breast as a grateful tear rolled down my cheek and she suckled, and we both sighed and fell asleep.

In December, three months into our stay at Sabina, I grabbed a book and walked out to the soccer field to sit on the grass and watch my husband play a match with the older village boys, as he did every Sunday morning these days. Afterwards he would be invited to lunch at one of their homes and the older girls would ask for me for help with their homework or they would try to teach me how to shake my hips with laughter on their lips while the boys pounded out ancient rhythms on makeshift drums.

Sitting cross-legged with sweat on my brow and grass tickling my ankles, I listened to the bustle and laughter all around me and was about to dive into my novel when I looked up and was surprised to see a dozen of the younger kids running in my direction. They pressed themselves into a small circle around me and began to ask me questions about my home, my family, how I celebrated Christmas, what a washing machine was, why uncle cooked and did the laundry so often, why we did not have children. I was delighted by their boldness. One of the little girls asked how old I was, and when I told her I was 31 she said, “But Auntie, you are so short!” And I laughed and laughed, having no idea what that meant.

One of the boys sitting just to my right pressed the skin on my forearm and then gasped loudly when he saw it turn white and then pink again. They all took turns pressing temporary patterns into my skin, and reassured me that if I stayed in Africa long enough, this problem would be fixed and I would turn nice and brown like them. “See, it is happening already!” proclaimed one of the boys, poking at my freckles.

Then one of the girls, the quietest in the group, asked if I would sing something for them.

I had just been listening to Alison Krauss’ version of “Down to the River to Pray,” so I sang that for them, nervously at first, and then I thought, to hell with it, and let the melody fall from my lips.

O, sisters, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
O, sisters, let's go down
Down in the river to pray…

“Auntie you have the most beautiful voice!” they cooed when I was done, with real wonder and joy in their beautiful brown eyes.

So I sang and sang, every song I knew, and in between they would also serenade me, some hymns that I knew very well and some Lugandan songs that made my throat close up and my nose prickle with tears.

Afterwards, we sat quietly and watched the boys kick the ball, and one of the girls put her hand in mine, and another rested hers on my thigh, and we all exhaled.

We didn’t do anything, we just leaned into one another there on the grass, and not a single one of us was scared.

Perhaps all mothering begins and ends with an imperfect song, with an outstretched hand, with a sigh. It’s not that I didn’t know how to do it, it’s only that in my uncertainty, I had forgotten.

When we stop trying so hard, we can remember all sorts of very important things.

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