This past year, my stepfather dismantled his impressive fish tank, which he'd husbanded carefully for many years (maintaining some astonishing fish to great sizes), and took up raising chickens. At first he had one small coop, but now he has two fenced areas with multiple roosts for both chickens and ducks.

I'm not sure what the total size of the flock is. Occasionally they get thinned -- for the family dinner or for gifts. My brother, who has quite a few Ethiopian friends, has brought ducks for fine occasions, and the house sometimes seems stacked to the rafters with eggs. I'm not sure why his friends' Ethiopianness should be so signficant, by the way, except I can't see our bourgeois neighbors in this high-rent bedroom community between Seattle and Bellevue welcoming a freshly killed bird as a house gift.

The birds are friendly. There is a chopping block for their slaughter that often rests right near their enclosure, but when a person pulls up in a car and steps out, the chickens in particular often run over to the fence. I walk over to them and chat and tell them they're beautiful and funny and imitate the sounds they make. They cock their heads to one side, regarding me with single eyes. Occasionally they get out of their enclosures, but I'm told by my stepfather and brother that they don't go far, and they seem easy enough to herd back into their little home.

My stepfather is the biggest -- almost certainly the only -- chicken farmer on Mercer Island. He doesn't have a rooster (or if he does, it must have no voice box), although he's got drakes (I'll tell you how I know this below). They are actually pretty quiet, and while I can imagine some ambivalence on the part of his neighbors, I have detected (and been told of) no hostility to his return to the land.

My stepfather is a pillar of the community, a dermatologist who provides medical dematology and cosmetic services in a pleasant, warm office on the south end of Mercer Island. It is a friendly place, although like all offices not without its politics. I used to worry that my stepfather was faintly embarrassed by my decidedly imperfect skin, but since his office opened, I've availed myself of some of what his science offers, and he has less cause for discomfort.

Last night I came upstairs to find him sitting behind the weight set in the exercise room with a couple of wet shop towels, a steel bowl full of water, some scissors, and an egg. He had some eggs and a duckling, one day old, in an incubator, but he found that the membranes in the eggs were overdrying, making it hard for the ducklings to peck their ways out of their eggs.

He'd assisted one already. I found him with the second, carefully cutting through membranes and giving them a chance to dry a little so this new life did not bleed to death as it was delivered from its shell. I held the first one in my hand, and it scrabbled over my fingers up to my wrist. Its tiny quacks are adorable cheeps, and it's little belly felt round on my palm. It flapped at me with tiny webbed feet with tinier claws. It was still wet from my stepfather's wiping it down after some of its egg's membrane had dried on its feathers.

I visited them briefly this morning, careful to open the incubator only once, extremely briefly. I had to look at them, look at their tiny black eyes, touch their pretty little backs, now fluffy with dry feathers. They clamored for me, cheeping, and I remembered my stepfather saying that he wanted to go ahead and let them imprint on us. Hello, little darlings, I'm Konrad. I'm flying away myself tomorrow, but I'll be back, always, eventually, back to this place.