Hens and Chickens Read Online Free PDF

side of town. A long-shuttered pea canning factory lingers near the abandoned train station as though hoping to hear the revived hiss from the steam engines. I will not say that Sovereign is NOT picturesque – especially in the sweet greenery of June when the scent of fresh-cut hay is in the air and the dairy cows lounge in the cool shade of gray clapboarded barns. But natural physical beauty is not that which has put Sovereign on the map. No, it is the character of Sovereign’s residents – an inner beauty – for which the town is known, and which has ensnared many wayward hearts (including my own).
    There are places in the world populated entirely by good people—people whose natural inclinations are compassionate, kind and thoughtful. Evil does not exist in these communities, having never been able to get a toehold here despite many varied and numerous runs at it over the centuries. These places are like frost-pockets of goodness, where the killing frost comes just in time to quenchall budding attempts at small-mindedness and mean spiritedness. No one knows for sure what has allowed these few places in the developed world to flourish in their innocence and decency, but most of us believe that – somewhere – these places exist. Sovereign, Maine, home to Miss Jan Hastings and 1,047 other souls, is one of these places.
    If you were ask Wendell Russell, 64, a direct descendant of the original 18 th century settlers of Sovereign (and Miss Hastings’ neighbor to the south on the Russell Hill Road), Wendell would probably credit this phenomena to something special in the soil – the soil which fed the trees and the corn and the cattle and ultimately the people of Sovereign that contributed to (or maybe even caused) this “kindness gene” in the good-hearted DNA of Sovereign descendants. “Wal, you know, they was all eatin’ the same peas, beans and corn when they stahted out,” Wendell would explain. “Or maybe ‘twas the apples, ‘cause, you know, they all shared the same pips back then.”
    They all shared the same pips back then.
    I have often wondered over the years if perhaps the early settlers of Sovereign shared back then because they had to share. Perhaps those folks necessarily learned to squash the natural greedy instincts with which we are all encumbered, and, by such squashing, the less-hardy traits of self-denial and grace were enabled to grow. Perhaps the early settlers, who, in 1790, pushed the boundary of white civilization when they moved out past Fort Halifax into the wild, unorganized territory of the District of Maine, recognized that they were dependent upon one another. They knew that fellowship mattered; that one man by himself would likely fail in this wilderness environment – especially in the God awful winters – but that a community might survive if they stuck together. Perhaps during one long, forsaken winter they awakened to the universal truth (which is so often overlooked or discarded) that it doesn’t matter which man owns the most oxen or which woman has the prettiest ribbons on her bonnet or which child is the smartest—no. None of that matters in the end. What matters in the end is how many times in this life we have said “I love you;” how many burdens carried by others we have offered to share; how many kind words we have bestowed upon children, the downtrodden and the elderly.
    There are those, of course (especially in neighboring Unity), who claim that religion is at the root of the modern day conviviality and goodness of the citizens of Sovereign. Some of these diviners point out that Sovereign was settled by Universalists (such as Miss Hastings’ family), whose steadfast belief in the doctrine of universal Christian salvation for all mankind likely encouraged the humanist notions of empathy and charity to abound. There are other oracles, however, who swear that the first settlers in the area were Quakers (Wendell Russell’s ancestors), who migrated to Sovereign