Photo courtesy Katrina/Flickr
April Fools’ Day was this past Tuesday, which I have mixed feelings about as a holiday. On one hand, I take great pleasure out of participating in pranks and I love seeing what people come up with on the Internet every year, but on the other, I’m just gullible enough that I tend to fall for tricks right away, only figuring out later that I’ve been had.
One year, as an elementary schooler, one of my friends told me the Spice Girls—yes, that storied British girl group from the late 90s—were coming to play a concert at my rural, 150-person school in Ohio; it was only after I got home and excitedly told my parents that I realized I was the victim of an April Fools’ prank. Sigh.
As I’ve aged, I’ve (thankfully) grown wiser and more discerning, but even this year, I was briefly had by a few articles online, and was even on the cusp of sharing them with my friends and co-workers before I remembered what day it was. (Chickens laying square eggs? Come on!)
At first, I was a little irritated that I had fallen victim to yet another April Fools’ prank—granted, on a much smaller scale than the Spice Girls Fiasco of 1998—but then I remembered Horace’s quote above. A little bit of merriment and April Foolishness injected into an otherwise average Tuesday morning is nothing to complain about. Chickens may not be able to lay square eggs (yet), but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have a good laugh about it, even if some of the laughter was at my own expense.
The same is true of prudent life on a hobby farm. Mucking out stalls and hauling yet another bucket of feed to the chicken coop can get a little monotonous and you can sometimes lose sight of why you’re living this lifestyle in the first place, but a little April Fools’ giggle can put the whole thing back into perspective—next time you slip in some manure and fall, or awaken to your rooster crowing at 4 a.m., try to find humor in the situation. As Horace says, it’s good to be a little silly at the right moment, and let me tell you, lying in a pile of poop is as good a moment as any for a good laugh.
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