Hugo, the gay Samoyed from down the road, who is completely obsessed with Jake, visited while we were out. He is not supposed to roam the neighbourhood. That might be the manners of a townie dog, but country dogs know better. Country dogs know that it is not acceptable to turn up uninvited! Country properties are places that abound with things that do not throw out the welcome mat to casually visiting dogs - electric fences, other dogs, sheep, cats, hens. Most of all, hens. The tattered feathers told the story, and the frightened and battered Aunty Tilly was found under a hedge nearby.
The Aunties are my beautiful Brown Shaver hens - the most productive animals at Tara Lodge. They have kept us in lovely brown eggs for a year now.

There were originally four. But as of yesterday, there are only two remaining - Madge and Violet.

I called them the Aunties early on in their life here, for a very simple reason. They remind me so vividly of my great aunts who were a central part of my childhood, with their constant activity and happy chattering.

The original Aunties, as we knew them collectively (they didn't seem to exist individually) were my mother's maiden aunts, my grandmother's sisters. Five of them lived together in a small weatherboard house in Western Springs, long before the motorway plowed its way through the suburb, demolishing little weatherboard houses and urban existences in its path.

The Aunties' house is no more. Gone with it is the huge Christmas plum tree that I used to scale to fill bags with the bright red fruit so Mum could make plum jam, the large slightly-scary-for-a-small-child painting of two huge orange lions that sat over the darkened fireplace, the large bed in the front room where Grandma Gibson sat in state waiting to die and trying to hit me with her large black leather handbag, and the very "Aunties" smell that pervaded the house reminiscent of a curious mixture of summer flowers and mothballs.

I was Queen Elizabeth in that house. The Aunties doted on me and I on them. What small child wouldn't love slightly eccentric elderly ladies who showered her with gifts, sweets and kisses. Tilly was the "mother" of the group, a quietly spoken, gentle woman with an iron will and ability to keep the others corralled in some semblance of normality.

Aunty Violet was my favourite. She was a happy plump woman with an air of someone who had been a real beauty living with a tragic memory of lost love. She always smelled of violets, and as a child, I was sure that's how she got her name. She had a "very good position" at Hutchinson's, the first deli in Auckland - purveyors of fine cheeses and coffee. It was a very exotic place to visit with high counters and many glass-enclosed boxes with wonderful smells emanating from them. I still get whisked back there when I enter a modern cheese shop.

I used to perch on a high wooden stool while Mum and Nana chatted with Aunty Violet and she would pass me a sliver of tasty cheese over the counter on a cheese knife. She must be responsible for my love of strong tasting cheese.

Aunty Rita and Aunty Mary were nuts, not to put too fine a point on it. These days, they would probably be called bipolar, but they seemed to go on a number of "holidays". I later found out that these were in the local psychiatric hospital. Maybe it was just that life had hugely disappointed them. I remember being told that all the Aunties had had wonderful men in their lives at some stage, but some of these men had never returned from the Great War, and some were chased off by Grandma Gibson, a tyrant of a woman in the best Irish tradition who always felt that no man was good enough for her "gals". For whatever reason, Aunty Rita and Aunty Mary used to disappear regularly and come back much more subdued and timid - very sad really. Aunty Mary's behaviour used to indicate an upcoming need for a "holiday", mainly relating to lawn mowing. The number of times that my father used to go to Cardigan Street to fix the mower blades on the little hand mower so they would actually connect with blades of grass was legendary, but Aunty Mary felt that it made lawn mowing too hard and would lift them again, so she could tear around the front lawn muttering to herself and spraying tips of grass everywhere.

Aunty Ellie is a little bit hazy in my mind. She was often away and I suspect she also had time inside mental facilities. She was a very delicate wasp of a lady, with her head held at a permanent tilt, and a faraway smile like she was thinking about times that were much better than the present.

So when the hens arrived at Tara Lodge, their constant hyperactivity and happy chook-chooking and head tilts brought back the warm happy memories of our visits to Cardigan Street. And they are great little providers too; a warm egg from each every morning. But dogs have decimated the flock, leaving only two lonely little brown hens doing their route march around the property every day, looking for juicy bugs or, unfortunately, lovely soft green leaves in newly planted flower beds.

And who says that animals don't feel emotions…………..