Day 4 ~ Beauty from Ashes

8″ x 8″ oil on canvas

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Once upon a time a carpenter’s wife decided to raise chickens. But because she was an artist she wanted to have hens that laid beautiful deep brown chocolate colored eggs and gorgeous sky blue eggs.  She bought some Black Marans chicks and raised them up and they gave her the beautiful brown eggs. Then she found some  special Ameraucana chicks that would lay the bluest eggs ever once they were grown, so she bought them too.

When the Ameraucana chicks were 3 months old she transferred them to a large chicken coop that was built between two horse stalls. It was built to be strong and to protect the chicks that would grow up inside of it. All around the bottom of the coop the carpenter dug and put a protective fence a foot deep and then covered it back up with dirt.

One morning when the carpenter’s wife went down to let her big hens out for the day, she saw that all 12 of her growing Ameraucana chicks were dead on the floor of their coop. She ran up to the house to get the carpenter as fast as she could. He came down and found that some animal had dug a big hole under the coop and pulled away the metal that was supposed to protect the chicks.

The carpenter’s wife was very sad. The massacre seemed senseless. She prayed to God and knew that she should be like Job and accept this sadness for “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord”.

A week later she was down feeding her hens some scratch, and she noticed a beautiful blue morning glory entwining itself around the metal posts that were attached to the old horse stalls. She went to take a closer look which brought her to the place where the hole still lay that the vicious animal dug, and there in the hole were beautiful blue-green eggs.

I called this painting  Beauty from Ashes because of those beautiful eggs found in the hole  where the animal dug in and killed the 3 month old chicks.

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