Lemons, Lemonade & Chicken Coops
This chicken coop was never meant to be here…
— Eric Hepburn (2016)
My wife Christie and I built a house in the east Austin Cherrywood neighborhood in 2008 and we adopted our son, Simon, in 2009. Around 2015, as Simon was starting first grade at Russell Lee Elementary School, we got new neighbors. As we got to know them, shared interests in urban chicken farming and deeper community building emerged. So we embarked upon an ambitious and transgressive chicken coop plan. We planned a semi-permanent structure that physically straddled the property line with a surrounding yard and gates connecting the newly forming chicken yard to each of our backyards.
One neighbor had brick-laying experience and created the perimeter beam foundation using a previously abandoned pile of bricks behind their detached garage. I salvaged some shipping crates that were destined for the landfill and broke them down into the raw components for the structure. Using mostly these kinds of found-materials and re-use strategies, we designed and built the coop, much as you see it pictured six years later. The only ‘new’ materials in the build were hardware, gorilla glue, paint, caulk, mortar, and the galvanized roofing material.
As I recollect the hours that went into chicken and coop design research, the iterative designs shared with colleagues, the drawings and the mockups… It was one of those consuming projects you think about incessantly from the moment you start it… until it takes on a life of its own.
The story of our neighbors’ divorce is not ours to tell… suffice it to say that it was painful and messy, as divorce often is. At that moment when they announced the divorce, the coop was about 95% finished & we were about 2 weeks away from getting our first chickens. Suffice it (also) to say that when they decided to sell the house, the realtor was unequivocal about the requirement that the chicken coop and ANY ambiguity about property ownership that it invited were unwelcome in the process. When we dream big, we sometime fail big… So, here we are with this custom designed, community-size (maximum healthy occupancy ~18 chickens), never-been-occupied, brick-foundation-on-top-of-the-property-line, beautiful, amazing, love-invested, hopes-of-deep-community-embodied, chicken coop — that we can’t keep…
I won’t dwell on the transitional moments where the chicken coop itself came to bear the scars of our neighbors’ pain — like the weekend we came home from camping to find the neighbor taking a Sawzall to the coop — or the four weekends after that, that I spent Frankensteining the coop back together so it could be safely moved in one piece… Those things happened, they added some bitterness to the experience… and over time those memories have become bittersweet. What I want to dwell on, what I think deserves to be dwelled upon, is this — right around this time, John Hewlett, Principal of Russell Lee Elementary, mentioned his aspiration to have a chicken coop on campus… “Well,” I said, “I may have just what you’re looking for…”
Thus ensued several intense weeks of planning and preparation, the assembly of a work crew and finding someone with a big truck and someone else who had access to a flatbed trailer. My friend Adam Joseph had gifted me four very large casters when he and his family moved to China — “I know you’ll find a good use for these…” he said… and so I did, gently jacking up the brick foundation and building a custom 4-wheeled. 6’ by 8’ furniture dolly in situ underneath the coop. When the day came we, the Russell Lee Elementary Crew, rolled this small building across the neighbor’s backyard, down their driveway, into the street, and up a ramp onto the waiting flatbed truck… Was it hairy? Oh, heck yes, it was hairy! But I think we only lost about 3 bricks on that part of the move.
Now came the fun part, the hill up from the parking lot behind the school to the installation site for the coop is also a wet-weather drainage area, so it is an uphill V — casters don’t really like unlevel ground and the inbound slopes made them try to tear the dolly apart with wrenching motions at every uneven patch of wheel contact. My vague recollection is that 3 hours of gently (sometimes not so gently) winching, wrenching, levering, pushing, pulling, and just plain struggling (mostly intelligently, occasionally dumbly) resulted in a coop building that was mostly intact (a few more missing bricks and some significant cracks in the brick skirt), mostly in the right place, and mostly level… For me, a few more days over the next two weekends got the freestanding roof over top of the building, the doors reinstalled, foundation shored up, scars patched, paint touched up… and then it took on a life of its own.
A life that we weren’t really a part of… Although we loved the community at Russell Lee, it wasn’t the right fit for our son’s learning differences and that first-grade year was the only year we spent at the school. So the life of the coop, the getting chickens, feeding chickens, keeping chickens safe from predators, collecting eggs, changing litter… all that life and activity and experimentation and successes and failures and joys and sorrows and stuff… it all went on, beautifully, gracefully, messily, amazingly, serendipitously, on, and on, and on…
This chicken coop was always meant to be here…
— Eric Hepburn (2022)
Six years after the coop installation, I went to visit Russell Lee Elementary last Friday. I had heard that Mr. Hewlett is taking a year off to travel the world with his family — an aspiration that we share and had discussed. I wanted to wish him well and to find out what had become of the project we had started together. I won’t lie. I needed an uplift. Work has been a struggle lately — holding the tension between stratospheric aspirations and bargain basement funding is hard on good days, and my recent days hadn’t been all that good.
So hearing stories from Mr. Hewlett about how the Campus Camp-Out with stories read from the chicken yard (https://www.lee-elementary.org/campus-camp-out/) has become a high-point annual event at the school, how the chicken coop is one highlight of the school tour. It brought tears to my eyes. It filled me with gratitude, that the right act of mindful love and kindness and generosity can nurture and be nurtured, how it can give love to a community and receive love from a community. How it can become a necessary and beloved part of the fabric of life that we co-create every day. You see; we were absent, but we weren’t. Our love was there, our intentions for health and relationship with nature and with food, our desire for deepening community, they were there the whole time, growing, nurturing, living. So the chicken coop that was never meant to be there, was so clearly, so obviously, so unavoidably and necessarily and couldn’t-have-been-any-other-way, and always meant to be there. Not permanently, but for right now, for its life and the lives it intersects. For the chickens and the humans and the mites and microbes and racoons and squirrels and songbirds and mice and rats and snakes and snails and lizards and plants and fungi and insects and myriads of life that happen in and around that little place. May they be blessed, may they flourish, may they remind us what is truly important in those moments when we lose sight.
Does ‘making lemons into lemonade’ count as a calling?
— Eric Hepburn (2022)
I don’t think that it quite fits as a calling, but I do feel quite confident that it is one of my talents. A pattern of repeated behavior, of perspective taking, of approach that is well worn in my tool belt. I love it… I do… I love the process of taking some minimal amount of nearly discarded stuff and investing it with so much attention and intention and love and life and energy and meaning that it becomes something beloved, maybe iconic, always life-giving and life-encouraging and life-celebrating… sometimes that stuff is tangible, sometimes less so. Helping others unlock moments in their lives where they get to experience that outflow of creative energy into the world has also been extremely rewarding for me — Brené Brown talks about freudenfreude in her new book Atlas of the Heart — yes, more of that. More joy in celebrating the joys of others!
I’m emotionally exhausted by the constant exposure to schadenfreude in the news and reality television and social media… I’m filled with grief that so many of my siblings (siblings just means all of y’all — it’s like a preacher’s ‘brothers and sisters’ without being gendered) are so damaged and traumatized that the tiny, insubstantial, short-lived, ego-satisfaction of feeling superior to others is driving so much of the creation and consumption of media. That we mistake that ego-satisfaction for actual superiority, or power, or supremacy… when, in fact, it is just insecurity, plain, simple, I-don’t-feel-loved-or-lovable insecurity. That’s what I see, when I look out at the vitriol. I don’t see demons in tanks destroying innocent people’s lives… I see scared little boys trying to hurt other people before they get hurt because they truly don’t believe that they can ever be safe or loved. They are trying to fill a God-sized (or love-sized or life-sized) hole in themselves with money or power or control or yachts or likes or clicks or retweets or oil or prestige or rocket ships or status… yet no matter how much they shovel, the hole remains. So their ego tells them, you’re not shoveling fast enough, hard enough… look, you know this hole can’t be bottomless! If you put enough stuff in there, it will fill up! Shovel, shovel, shovel!! It is bottomless, the pit I mean, but there’s a secret… just like you don’t fill a hole in a shirt by shoveling stuff THROUGH it, you can’t fill up this hole by shoving stuff into it… to do so is to misunderstand the nature of the hole.
The hole is a rend in the fabric of your soul made by your deep-seated belief in something deeply untrue and incredibly sharp: you are not enough. Friend, and I am counting you as a friend if you’ve read this far — even if we’ve never met and will never meet, you are enough. This amazing universe conspired to make you — and you are as inextricable from the fabric of life and existence as any other being or object that has been, is, or will be anywhere in the space-time-continuum… Here’s the rub, you are not alone in this — your uniqueness makes you you, but that truth is a rare universal — your being isn’t better or more important or more unique than any other — and yet, here you are, as YOUR body.
If we can’t fill the hole, how de we mend it? Relatedness: a sense of belonging and connection; security, support, inclusion, and acceptance usually experienced in the context of healthy relationships. We experience so much of life from our own perspective. It is SO reinforced by the strands of individualism running through western colonial culture. It is easy to forget that we are an ultra-social species. We can’t, and don’t, do anything of importance alone — we can’t even survive birth without a ton of help (welcome to being a primate)! Even the way in which we create and transmit knowledge and technology gives lie to the illusion of the self-made. We are all inextricably self-made and other-made, that’s what it means to be ultra-social. The thread that repairs the hole is relatedness, the needle that feeds the thread can only sometimes reside in our own hands, often it must pass into the hands of another if it is to return to us and make another stitch. If this analogy, this sense of a missing tooth in your mouth that you tongue keeps discovering, this longing to search out the frayed edges of your own hole and to find other hands you can trust with your needle. If this sensation is rising in you, greet it with all the curiosity that you can muster. It is a thing worth nurturing. It might even be the hint you’ve been looking for to find the next step on your path home.
The path home, full circle. One of my favorite moments in The Matrix is when Morpheus says, “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” When two neighboring families set out to build a chicken coop that broke rules and built stronger communities, they thought they knew how that story would play out. They didn’t, they couldn’t have imagined, they would never-ever have taken those first steps had they even known or suspected what lay in store. But we didn’t need to know. We didn’t need to know that this was the mysterious universe’s way of building the chicken coop that Russell Lee Elementary needed, we only had to show up with our hearts, with our minds, with our love, and our energies and take one step at a time. And when that same universe tossed us a curve ball and threw us some lemons, we had to be open to the change we couldn’t avoid. We had to ask the trickster gods of the metaverse, “Okay, you didn’t want the original plan. What new plan were we starting on that we didn’t understand at the time?” That’s making lemonade out of lemons: learning to listen to the life all around you, putting its needs above your own, being in relationship with it, finding relatedness in it, passing the needle hand-to-hand until all the souls are mended, and the chicken coop is precisely where it was always meant to be.
