Waking up with the chickens
Magda comes in from a walk with Adam and announces that Slovenia is preparing for bird flu. What does this mean? I ask. “I don’t know, it’s just that the newsstand had a poster up with a headline on it, and it said something like, “Slovenia prepares for bird flu.”
We spend a few moments speculating about fluctuations in the price of duck breast.
Later we are watching BBC World News. Bird flu has been confirmed in Turkey and Romania. Across the bottom of the screen a blood-red newsbar announces IN ALL CAPS what is being done about this creeping public health menace:
EU URGES CITIZENS TO MOVE POULTRY INDOORS
With Greece reporting an outbreak, and the European Commission ordering our southern neighbor Croatia to perform tests on some suspect birds, we go to bed comforted by the idea of all those EU citizens moving all their poultry indoors. Safe at last!
This sounds like the good old days when I visited my cousin’s baka on the Una River in Croatia. Woke up each morning in thick feather beds, with a chicken pecking at my toes. Feeding Time!
One chicken even played a shell game with us. Hey! We didn’t have cable; had to make do with mental combat with feathered friends.
Comment by DarkoV — Tuesday 18 October 05 @ 19.08 MDT+2.00