It's an island thing!

It's definitely winter here in the Midwest!  Our family recently took a trip to Grand Cayman Island and missed the post-Thanksgiving snowstorm.  It's always great to be able to relax and recuperate, and we definitely enjoyed the time away.  I will fully admit that even though there is about 12 inches of snow on the ground today and the temperature here is about 75 degrees cooler than where we just were this past week, it's good to be back home.

While we were at the beach, we were visited several times by a small group of feral chickens (including one very proud and very noisy rooster - who ever said that roosters only crow at dawn??).  If you've never spent time on a tropical island, the chickens would be a fairly unwelcome surprise.  However, just about every tropical island that we've been to (including the island of Guam where we were stationed as a family during my time in the Navy) has feral chickens!  As I said to one of our kids this week, "It's an island thing!"  Apparently the feral chicken population has grown so large in Hawaii that the local government has started taking measures to control the population (see The Atlantic article, "Hawaii's feral chickens are out of control").

There is something unsettling about having a chicken walk up to you while you are trying to relax on the beach.  While I consider myself a lover of animals, I could do without the feral chickens on my beach vacation.  They are a nuisance.  But that got me thinking more.  Nothing is perfect.  We learn to appreciate things when we take the good with the bad, the positive with the negative.  When we lived in Guam, I think we started to take for granted the fact that we were completely surrounded by the ocean and could go to the beach whenever we wanted.  It was only when we headed back to the Midwest and spent time in the cold that we really and truly appreciated all the great things about living on a tropical island.

With all things, you learn to take the good with the bad.  Sometimes you have to experience the bad in order to appreciate the good things in life.  And sometimes, you just need to tolerate the feral chickens, because "It's an island thing!"