The chickens are pooping all over the front porch again, and my wife is a very special woman.

Almost every week, at some point or another, Carolyn says how happy she is to live at Rancho Cappuccino, surrounded by the wildlife and the livestock, steeping in nature’s own exotic brew of life, death, struggle and ecstasy.

Sounds great, you may say, but the chickens are pooping all over the porch. The geese are pooping all over the lawn. The manure in the sheep pen is two feet deep right now and  the pasture where the cattle are grazing, well, it’s a cow pasture. Talk about your exotic brews.

The cow is a virtuosic defecator. They poop more, larger, wetter, deeper, noisier and more often than anyone else on the farm.

But all God’s children leave their mark.

The chickens leave theirs on the front porch.

My wife’s friends are revolted. Who can blame them?

But my wife is a very special woman.

We’ve tried solutions to the chicken problem. We tried fake snakes. The chickens ignored them, then killed a real snake and left it there, next to the fake snakes on the porch, to express their disdain I guess. This really happened. No kidding.

Then we created a barrier of silk flowers in little buckets. The chickens steer clear. Guests have to step over them.

Of course the chickens still do their business all over the sidewalk and the drive way and the lawn.

I’m acutely conscious that there are very few roommates who would put up with this, and almost all of them are men. If you think I’m being a sexist,  you have an invitation to come help me clean the sheep pen. Then we can talk about my prejudices.

I figure if Carolyn decided to divorce me, I could either move to town or be single for life. I try to think of some other attractive woman who would be willing to join me at the Rancho. I can’t. Even some of the best sports I know can’t hide the little grimaces that say, “How can they live like this? How can she live like this?”

So here’s to Carolyn, with all my gratitude. I’ll make sure I take my boots off every time I come inside. Promise. Unless I forget.

BRYAN WELCH

My neighbor Bill is a great asset to me. He understands machines. When one of my machines isn’t running and I have no idea how to fix it (pretty much every time), I can ask Bill and get a reasonable, logical and well-informed set of directions. Typically, just what I need. In his own shop he has a Farmall H tractor he’s restored, a garden tractor he built from scratch and a 2,000-pound belt-driven drill press he picked up somewhere. His place is immaculate and Bill’s just about the fittest 80-year-old you’ll ever meet.

Bill spends most of his time caring for his wife, Beverly, who has Parkinson’s Disease. I tell Bill she’s lucky to have him. He says he’s lucky to have her.

Beverly’s taken a turn for the worse since she had knee surgery recently, and the other day a for-sale sign showed up on Bill’s lawn. He told me they’re moving into a retirement home. He’s decided he needs a little more help to give Beverly the life they want for her.

He invited me over to look at some of his farm equipment and tools he won’t need any more.

“I have a lot of projects, but I guess I ran out of time,” he said.

And it occurred to me that he didn’t mean he ran out of time that day, or this week. He meant he’d run out of time. He sounded disappointed but he wasn’t maudlin. Bill seemed to figure running out of time — running out of life, as it were — is a perfectly natural state of affairs.

I guess that’s right.