We had to get up very early this morning, so last night, Maria took her Ipad up to bed so she could set the alarm.  I got up at 4:30 and was starting the wood fire and getting ready to feed the dogs and cats, and then meditate, and as I sat down, I heard a rooster crowing loudly right outside the window where I was sitting.

We have no rooster, and I shot the last one we had, and we are done with roosters. I couldn’t imagine where this loud and raucous sound was coming from or how a rooster might be in the barn. Perhaps, I thought, someone dumped their rooster near our barn and maybe he was going after our hens. I grabbed a stick and a torch and pulled on my jacket – plenty cold last night – and ran outside (I have to confess that this is definitely where I would have yelled “Rose, let’s go to work” and she would have gone right to the rooster, wherever he was,  and circled him.) I couldn’t hear or see anything. I ran into the barn, and the three chickens were sitting quietly up in the roost. The donkeys, who also clearly heard the sound, were running back and forth anxiously, clearly disturbed.

I thought I heard the rooster again, but a bit farther away. Thoroughly confused and frozen, I returned to the farmhouse after a thorough search and I yelled upstairs and asked Maria if she had heard a rooster. I heard her laugh. Oh, she said, that was my the alarm in my Ipad. I chose a rooster sound, one of the options. Eventually, I couldn’t stop laughing.