If you don't like Texas weather....

.... just stick around and it will change in the next fifteen minutes. (So sayeth the Texas weather wizards.)

Our temperatures have been flip-flopping between freezing (around 50 degrees) and normal (around 74 for December). My husband said that during this past summer, we couldn't buy a raindrop, and for the past week, we couldn't buy a ray of sunshine.

It has been drippy, cloudy, foggy, dreary. One day's temperature goes no higher than 55 degrees (translation: three layers of sweaters) and the next day's temperature reaches to the low 70s (one sweater). I'm trying very hard not to complain, especially when I listen to the news and hear the single-digit temperatures in the Northeast and the double-digit inches of snow in the Midwest.

Today's weather is cloudy but at least there's no rain. It's windy and cold outside, and from the second floor of our house, I can hear the howling wind, which makes me feel colder. So I'm sitting here with two layers of sweaters and a shawl around my shoulders. (A shawl with a blanket thickness that could keep an Eskimo warm.)

I delivered the last of the Christmas cookies to the neighbors yesterday. When I went across the road to D & S's house, D told me to come in out of the damp for a few minutes. He wanted to talk about chickens. How many did we have left? Were we getting any more? Baby chicks? Or hens?

I told him that we were talking about getting just two more hens after the holidays. No more Guinea hens-- we have two of those now, plus one chicken who seems to have passed her egg-laying days. D gave me a lesson in hawks, telling me that a hawk swoops down so hard on top of a chicken that it breaks the chicken's back before it lifts it up off the ground. (Just what I wanted to know.)

He asked me about the coyote I saw in our courtyard, and suggested that it may have been a fox or a bobcat. I told him that this city-girl knows the difference between a fox, a coyote, and a bobcat. Nevertheless, D told me that a fox has a very bushy tail and a very pointed snout. Yes, I know. Coyotes don't usually come that close to the house unless they're starving. Yes, I know. Then he showed me a picture of a bobcat that he had killed on his property a few years ago. It measured 52 inches from head to tail. What?! 52 inches?! Good grief.

As I sit here typing, I have a gold glittered-paper Christmas ornament with a photo of my red hen Dolly framed in the center of it. The ornament came in the mail yesterday with a Christmas card from my friend F up in the really frozen single-digit Northeast. It was one of the first photos we took of the chickens, and Dolly is standing there in all her pretty auburn feathers, staring with her yellow eyes at the camera. I hope you're getting my good side with that there camera.

I was going to put this pretty ornament downstairs with a small display of porcelain chickens, but I'm not ready to do that yet. I like it right up here on my computer, where I spent a lot of time at my desk. I'm trying not to think of a hawk breaking Dolly's back, or Dolly being taken away into the woods by a starving coyote.

I'm just trying to remember that beautiful red hen and how much she trusted me when she was with us. After all, she was just a chicken, for goodness sake. But she followed me around the yard like my shadow, and seemed to really like to be picked up and told how beautiful she was. You are the most beautiful chicken in the coop, my Dolly-girl. And the eggs.... so very warm in that nesting box. Thank you for the warm little miracle, my sweet Dolly-girl. And I always knew when she was getting ready to lay her egg because she would walk up and down the courtyard, just clucking and clucking, announcing that she was ready.

When I go out into the coop during the day, I talk to Audrey the way I used to talk to Dolly. It's not the same. Dolly used to sit there with her head cocked to the side and she would just stare at me for as long as I talked, as if she were listening to every word. Chickens get to recognize your voice, and I guess Dolly got to know mine and liked it. But not Audrey-- she just looks at me for a couple of seconds and then walks away. Sorry. Not interested. There are bugs in the dirt waiting for me. As for the Guinea hens-- I don't even try and talk to them anymore. They are in a world of their own, and unless you've got food in your hands, they're definitely not "into you" at all.

I asked our neighbor D how many times over the years he had to replace all of his chickens. He thought a few minutes and said that over the past eight years, he had to start all over three times, after losing all of his chickens to either hawks or raccoons or coyotes. D thinks it's cruel for me to keep my remaining three birds confined to the coop and the small fenced-in yard just outside the coop. He said they should be roaming all over the property, the way they used to.

Well, of course he's right-- they should be free to roam. But they should also be safe from back-breaking hawks and starving coyotes and 52-inch long bobcats. For right now, I'm leaving our birds right where they are. They may not be the happiest hens, but they're safe.