The drive to Mark's ancestral home in Kentucky is short but nerve-wracking.  Just across the Virginia-Kentucky border, the roads go haywire with steep dropoffs, square feet of pavement missing from important places, and a complete lack of guard rails.  I usually close my eyes and think of England.

So, when I felt the car slow, I feared the worst --- Mark had spied oncoming traffic.  Gulp.  But no menacing headlights materialized in front of my nervous eyes.  Instead, Mark was peering across the creek at a nicely mown yard complete with trampoline and free range chickens.

The dozen hens were perched around the edges of the big trampoline, napping through the cloudy morning.  I didn't have the camera with me, so I've recreated the scene for your enjoyment.  Okay, so the hens weren't actually jumping on the trampoline in real life, but can you prove to me that they weren't leaping for joy moments before we drove past?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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