Driving has never been my thing. I like to think that, after 30 years of driving, I’m a competent driver, maybe even at the peak of my driving performance. Thirty years is a long time since I drove around Ohio County, Indiana, in the dual-braked driver’s ed car with 3 other girls while we listened to Mr. John Roeder’s favorite, John Cougar Mellencamp. He was John “Cougar” in those days. That’s how long I’ve been driving.

After thirty years, I don’t think my friends and acquaintances talk about my driving behind my back. I’m just a cautious driver.

But I’ve never liked it. The long lost tradition of a Sunday afternoon drive has always been lost on me. I was a  carsick toddler. I have memories of puking alongside every Alberta highway and forestry road. When people ask what I remember about being a preschooler in Northern Canada, they’re disappointed to learn that the answers are (a) being potty-trained; (b) drawing on my friend Ricky with a pen and getting in trouble; (c) falling down on the ice rink, and (d) lots and lots of puking next to a car.

Undoubtedly, my Grandpa Carnahan’s habit of piling me and my grandma along with his friends Kingie and Frances into the car of a summer evening and driving around to look at fields didn’t add to my love of cars. Kingie smoked unfiltered cigarettes the whole time while Grandma, Frances, and I suffocated in the back seat where the AC didn’t reach. Thank god for flat southwestern Indiana roads, or I would have revived my preschool habit of puking.

Being a person of great imagination and also the best friend of creativity, high anxiety, I didn’t love driving any more after I made the move to the driver’s seat. Do  kids today still watch terrible videos about car crashes in health class? I know that the state of Indiana only required me to take a two semesters of Health Class, but in my memories, every day of high school brought a fresh or repeated movie about the dangers of driving. I was the ideal audience for these movies. Nobody needed to scare me straight. Just scare me, and I was ready for a lifetime of law-abiding driving, not to mention imagined terrors every time I got behind the wheel between the ages of 16 and 18.

So I don’t like driving although I’m now the primary driver in our family. Chris walks to work, so I’m the caretender of the car and its needs. I have a few rules that make me a successful, if disgruntled, driver.  They are:

1. Never be more than 1000 miles late for an oil change.
2. Never pass on a two lane country road unless you can see for a good half-mile
3. Pay attention to what people are doing in front of you.
4. Five mph above the speed limit is fine, but no more.
5. You are, under no circumstances, more important than anyone on the road. In other words, be careful.

This summer, the main road between our house and the county seat is being dug up for road work. It’s not repaving. It’s not a slight widening. No, about ½ a mile from our home, there are wide man-tall ditches where the workers are replacing underground pipes before they do the road work itself. What used to be a straight road now veers all over the place through these giant holes in the ground. New ditches appear weekly and lanes move around as if the road were a living serpent in a decaying landscape. I’m sure to the workers who have to dig these pits, asphalt new lanes, and then paint new lines on what seems like a daily basis, well, I’m sure this process doesn’t seem as fast and otherworldly.

Last week, I was driving home from a trip to the grocery store in Richmond. From a ways off, I could see that the traffic pattern coming into town had changed again. Not only that, it looked like the state road workers — God bless them and give them a raise — were setting up the new pattern right then. I knew that this was not good news for me. I knew I was going to have a hard time figuring out where I was supposed to drive.

But I was happy to see there was another car in front of me. I would not need to figure out where the new lanes were and where the old road disappeared. I would just play follow the leader.

Except… the driver of the vehicle in front of me couldn’t figure the road out any better than I could. First, they stopped to ask the worker where they were supposed to go. Smart move, I thought. Then they pulled forward for about 10 feet before stopping again. A worker ran up to the car and pointed out the next bit of lane.

If I were a person who liked to drive, I imagine that I might have been impatient or dismissive with this driver ahead of me. Instead, I was happy to know that there was someone else to whom these meandering maze of ditches was also a impermeable experience. The driver finally slowly led me forward, with many more stops to figure out which part of the road to drive on. She — I’m calling the driver a “she” — probably thought she about to get honked at, but I couldn’t have been happier to follow her until we made it to the next light and a familiar traffic pattern.

I suppose there might be a metaphor here. Cynically, someone else might invoke the cliche of the “blind leading the blind.”  Not me. If there’s any parable here, it’s that the ground is ever slipping beneath our feet. Maybe each birthday takes us further into a world that seems less familiar than than the one of our childhood. Maybe it’s that the unprecedented chaos in our politics and our governance makes it seem as though man-high ditches are springing  up around us. Aa Yeats tell us, “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Everything feels novel and awful, every day, and yet somehow I made it home to put away the ice cream before it melted, thanks to the driver in front of me.

Me, I’m just glad that someone else is just as baffled as I am by the summer road work in Berea, and I find comfort in the truth that if we drive slow enough and ask for enough help, we’re maybe going to make it through the widening of US-25.

Chickens don’t know about Donald Trump. I can’t stress enough the importance of this fact in my life right now: chickens do not know about Donald Trump.

A flock of chickens came to live with us this spring. Paul has wanted chickens since he was 4 years old. Being parents and naturally resistant to bringing more creatures into our lives, we put him off for six years.

First, we told him that we had to get our own house in Berea. That goal achieved, we told him that we had to get settled into our new home. We may even have told him that Daddy had to get tenure before we could get chickens. Finally, we said that he could possibly get chickens in the fourth grade. If his school was still hatching chickens through the 4-H program when he was in the fourth grade, he could bring one of the classroom chickens home.

This year, that distant date in the far future — 4th grade! — arrived. It was time to get serious about chickens. In the months leading up to their arrival, Chris and Paul read books about chickens and their care, and Chris worried about whether we would be up to the task. I researched chicken permits in the town of Berea and drew a little map of our coop for City Hall. I found a low-cost coop kit that looked like we could reasonably assemble it. I began accumulating supplies for keeping baby chicks in the basement, and Chris and Paul built a brooder out of a plastic bin and some bird netting. We talked to friends who had chickens. We joined the Tractor Supply rewards program.

After an eventful two weeks of classroom life with 22 lively fourth graders, two chickens came home in late March, and they were soon joined by four friends from Tractor Supply. One of the classroom chickens died quickly, but the other five of the flock stayed in the basement under the light long enough for us to be very tired of having chickens in the house. The cold spring delayed their move to the coop outside. At Mother’s Day, they finally moved into their own home outside our back door.

And that’s when Chris and I discovered the pure joy of having backyard chickens. Chickens don’t know about Donald Trump. Chickens don’t know about anything except being chickens. They are not weighed down by a knowledge of English and a subscription to three different newspapers.

Although the chicken’s are Paul’s, we adults  find ourselves drifting outside of an evening to watch them. Sure, that’s when they need their food and water changed, but we also let them out of their chicken run for an hour. We watch them wander around the yard, peck their way into some kind of order, and experiment with eating weeds and rocks.

Casey is the smallest chicken and believes that she should lead a life of free and wild adventure. It takes sneaking, herding, and sometimes the sight of the Terrifying Green Leaf Rake get her back into the coop at night. She is half the size of the household cat, but the cat is afraid of her. Big Amber and Pluff are the advanced chickens with impressive combs and are suspected of being possible roosters. The twins — Zelda and Big Ears — started life as “The Twins”  because we only recently started to be able to tell them apart. They are ciphers.

They all look like dinosaurs at times, especially when they stretch their necks. They fly for a few feet around the yard when they want to show each other who’s boss. Casey’s the boss, but Big Amber and Pluff don’t recognize her leadership. She has a tiny, rubbery comb, so her rule must be challenged daily.

What you discover, if you’re an adult with a beer sitting around in a chicken yard at around 7 PM, is that your stress and worries retreat like the cat from a marauding Casey the Chicken. The chickens do not know about work; they don’t know about parenting teenagers; they don’t know about college politics; they don’t know about illness and aging; and they especially don’t know about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump tries to suck up all the attention in the nation. He’s successful at it, but he doesn’t command attention with the kindness, gentleness, and goodness of a Mr. Rogers or a Koko the Gorilla (RIP).  What he’s done to immigrant children this month is so terrible and terrifying that a person feels like she ought to be paying attention every second of every day, like she should check twitter in the middle of the night, like she should never stop ceasing to write and march.

And so there’s nothing better than a few minutes of an evening to spend watching the chickens. They don’t know about the President. They can’t know about the President. For a short time each day, there’s nothing more refreshing

Chickens don’t know about Donald Trump. I can’t stress enough the importance of this fact in my life right now: chickens do not know about Donald Trump.

A flock of chickens came to live with us this spring. Paul has wanted chickens since he was 4 years old. Being parents and naturally resistant to bringing more creatures into our lives, we put him off for six years.

First, we told him that we had to get our own house in Berea. That goal achieved, we told him that we had to get settled into our new home. We may even have told him that Daddy had to get tenure before we could get chickens. Finally, we said that he could possibly get chickens in the fourth grade. If his school was still hatching chickens through the 4-H program when he was in the fourth grade, he could bring one of the classroom chickens home.

This year, that distant date in the far future — 4th grade! — arrived. It was time to get serious about chickens. In the months leading up to their arrival, Chris and Paul read books about chickens and their care, and Chris worried about whether we would be up to the task. I researched chicken permits in the town of Berea and drew a little map of our coop for City Hall. I found a low-cost coop kit that looked like we could reasonably assemble it. I began accumulating supplies for keeping baby chicks in the basement, and Chris and Paul built a brooder out of a plastic bin and some bird netting. We talked to friends who had chickens. We joined the Tractor Supply rewards program.

After an eventful two weeks of classroom life with 22 lively fourth graders, two chickens came home in late March, and they were soon joined by four friends from Tractor Supply. One of the classroom chickens died quickly, but the other five of the flock stayed in the basement under the light long enough for us to be very tired of having chickens in the house. The cold spring delayed their move to the coop outside. At Mother’s Day, they finally moved into their own home outside our back door.

And that’s when Chris and I discovered the pure joy of having backyard chickens. Chickens don’t know about Donald Trump. Chickens don’t know about anything except being chickens. They are not weighed down by a knowledge of English and a subscription to three different newspapers.

Although the chicken’s are Paul’s, we adults  find ourselves drifting outside of an evening to watch them. Sure, that’s when they need their food and water changed, but we also let them out of their chicken run for an hour. We watch them wander around the yard, peck their way into some kind of order, and experiment with eating weeds and rocks.

Casey is the smallest chicken and believes that she should lead a life of free and wild adventure. It takes sneaking, herding, and sometimes the sight of the Terrifying Green Leaf Rake get her back into the coop at night. She is half the size of the household cat, but the cat is afraid of her. Big Amber and Pluff are the advanced chickens with impressive combs and are suspected of being possible roosters. The twins — Zelda and Big Ears — started life as “The Twins”  because we only recently started to be able to tell them apart. They are ciphers.

They all look like dinosaurs at times, especially when they stretch their necks. They fly for a few feet around the yard when they want to show each other who’s boss. Casey’s the boss, but Big Amber and Pluff don’t recognize her leadership. She has a tiny, rubbery comb, so her rule must be challenged daily.

What you discover, if you’re an adult with a beer sitting around in a chicken yard at around 7 PM, is that your stress and worries retreat like the cat from a marauding Casey the Chicken. The chickens do not know about work; they don’t know about parenting teenagers; they don’t know about college politics; they don’t know about illness and aging; and they especially don’t know about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump tries to suck up all the attention in the nation. He’s successful at it, but he doesn’t command attention with the kindness, gentleness, and goodness of a Mr. Rogers or a Koko the Gorilla (RIP).  What he’s done to immigrant children this month is so terrible and terrifying that a person feels like she ought to be paying attention every second of every day, like she should check twitter in the middle of the night, like she should never stop ceasing to write and march.

And so there’s nothing better than a few minutes of an evening to spend watching the chickens. They don’t know about the President. They can’t know about the President. For a short time each day, there’s nothing more refreshing