Jacques, our neighbor’s rooster, drives my son, Jeff, absolutely crazy when he comes home.  Jacques is up and at ’em bright an early in the morning, making racket through which it is difficult to sleep. When he is able to sleep through it,  Jeff dreams of ways to eliminate Jacques from the planet. 

I love Jacques.  Jacques reminds me of home.  He reminds me of sleeping on the back porch on a cot on a hot summer night when our home in Northern Illinois was not surrounded by shopping centers and subdivisions, but rather by farms.  I admit he is noisy.  I love our neighbors for adopting him.  I asked my neighbor where she got him.  She said “as far as I know, he came from your house, I looked up and he was walking down the hill from the direction of your place…”   She apologizes for the noise.  I love the noise.

Jacques does not distinguish between morning and midday and evening.  Jacques makes noise whenever his little heart desires.  I don’t know what he’s looking for.  Well, maybe I do.  He was quieter for awhile when Babette came on the scene, courteously provided to him by our neighbors, but Babette apparently met her demise soon after at the hands of a coyote who was hanging around in their backyard.  They got another girlfriend for him but did not name her and she too, met a fate we don’t want to talk about.  Right now they are in the process of building a better home for future mates for Jacques.

As I write, Jacques is letting me know he is there.  He is insistent, he is incorrigible, he is funny, but most of all, he  gives me a gift that has no monetary value – he takes me back to those hot summer mornings, when I was awakened by the crow of a farm rooster, letting me know it was time to get up and play again in the little clump of forest in the middle of farm country that I called home.