This morning's prompt is 'nest box'.

I made my mom's chickens some nest boxes. This was four, now five years ago, the summer I almost lost my big toe to complications with my then undiagnosed diabetes. It was willful ignorance, I should have figured it out for myself...

Anyway, I made some next boxes while I was out of work because I couldn't wear my steel toed work boots til the toe healed, so I built the chickens a kludgy cube shelter and two slightly different nest boxes. Then my brother built a much bigger and nicer shelter with and an A-frame roof, the 'chicken church'.

My Dad died that August...

(2019 sucked. Lost Aunt Marie and Uncle Dick on the same day in January and then my Dad at the end of August)

***

"These nest boxes are falling apart..."

Ben shrugged. He did that a lot, Brenda thought, and realized he spoke maybe a word at a time, a verbal miser. He surprised her, then.

"Blame it on the carpenter. I didn't know what I was doing, but my brother talked me through it. Said I did a good job, the lying b-"

Ben turned away, got himself under control and Brenda waited, wondering the obvious.

"He was over in Europe, on business, when all this went down. Came back, or started back on one of the flights that went down in the Atlantic. The ghouls were speculating that pilot ditched it on purpose with half full tanks, nose dive into the only rock for hundreds of miles. I guess you couldn't blame him for not bringing that home to his family-"

"Hers?"

"What?"

"My sister was captain on one of those flights." Brenda scowled. "It got here anyway, didn't it?"

"You do what you can, wherever you are, as best you can for as long as you can, and then you can die hoping it's enough."