THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 4, 1996 TAG: 9604040035
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Profile
SOURCE: BY EMILY PEASE, CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LANEXA LENGTH: Long : 183 lines
JUST A YEAR ago, Peggy Lawrence was about the most popular person you could find at Easter.
At her little place on a hill in Lanexa, west of Williamsburg, she was the mama of hundreds of baby chicks and ducks. People drove over the two wooden bridges that lead to her house and stepped onto her porch to see the babies scratching and peeping in wire shelves that reached to the ceiling.
The people took them home. They took them to school. They took them anywhere anybody had a need for something fuzzy for Easter.
To Lawrence, each little bird was the very essence of life. It was as if nature - the will to survive and be born and grow - was rolled into every tiny, just-hatched bird.
Just a year ago, Lawrence was feeding close to 7,000 birds. Ducks, geese, swans, chickens, turkeys, pheasants - you name it.
This year is different. The chickens are gone. Because Lawrence's granddaughter, Shelley, is sick. At 9, she's in line for her third heart surgery.
``It's a heavy spring,'' Lawrence says. ``Everything is different.''
Not everything. Not really. Lawrence, 54, still has that deep, warm laugh. And, even without her chickens, she still has enough animals to fill a small zoo.
Some of the geese are laying eggs on the bank by the pond. Lawrence still has 125 pigeons in a pen out back, and 23 turkeys.
Lawrence's life philosophy is wrapped up in her inventory.
``Those animals will show you the fundamentals of life with every beat of their heart,'' she says. What they're showing her right now is that Shelley will make out just fine. It won't be easy, but she'll make it.''
``It's just survival,'' Lawrence says. ``It's life.''
That's why Lawrence's rambling little outfit in Lanexa, with all the signs of springtime vitality - quacking, honking, screeching - is still worth remembering at Easter.
It all started with decoys.
Sitting on the porch of her old two-room cabin 12 years ago, Lawrence looked out and imagined ducks swimming peacefully on the pond below. Back then, the pond was nothing but a big hole in the ground, with dark, shallow water and cattails growing along the edge. It was begging for ducks.
Her sons gave her two plastic decoys. She floated them, but nothing flew in for a visit.
So she bought her own ducks. Live ones.
She started with six Pekin ducks: solid white, with bright orange bills and orange feet. They swam on the pond and ate all the water lilies.
Then she added six African gray geese. They ate the cattails.
Next, a family of beavers moved in of their own accord. They took care of the rest of the landscaping, trimming out the brush and letting in the sunlight. Lawrence sat on her porch and watched the whole process, transfixed.
``It was more or less a wild Pandora's box,'' she says now. ``Everybody felt at home up here, and I was enjoying the scenic view.''
She went to the state fair, where she stood for hours looking at the exotic chickens, ducks and quail.
``I saw so many pretty birds,'' she says. ``And then people told me about a bird show.''
After the bird show, she was a changed woman. In her mind, her 17 acres, complete with the pond and the tidal marsh and the black water in the woods out back, could become a sanctuary.
Lawrence wanted more life, and she wanted it abundantly. Indoors and out, even though her house was, and remains, tiny.
She bought a myna bird, and she bought Quaker parakeets. She bought six breeding pairs of cockatoos and cockatiels. She added golden finches and red-throated finches and three kinds of canaries.
Lawrence began filling big pens outside. She got chickens of all kinds - standard-size and bantams, fuzzy-footed silkies and classic Rhode Island Reds. They crowed all day and into the evening, and they crowed before the half-light of dawn.
Add honking geese, quacking mallard ducks and black ducks and wood ducks. Silent, gliding swans. Screaming peacocks and screeching guinea fowl.
Turkeys, pheasants, quail.
An emu named Emma. And Emma's mate, Emu. The emus took the pen down the hill, where they would stride along the fence, 5 feet tall, able to meet a person eye-to-eye. They left three-toed footprints in the mud the size of a dinner plate.
Add five rheas - ugly versions of Big Bird - also tall, like the emus, and also big-footed, with hairy gray necks and fluffy back sides.
And the birds laid eggs. Laid and laid and laid. Turkey eggs, quail eggs, chicken eggs, duck eggs, goose eggs, pheasant eggs, emu eggs. And the eggs hatched.
Soon, the schoolchildren began to arrive. Whole groups of children wandered the grounds, poking their fingers into the pens. They made gobbling sounds next to the turkey pens. The ducks quacked, and the children quacked back.
Lawrence was happy to let the children hear the sound of real geese honking and to see peacocks spread their long blue feathers. On her crazy, patchwork bird farm, which she named Creekside Aviaries, children could sense nature at work, could feel what Lawrence calls ``the fundamentals of life, the basic needs: socializing, mating, nesting, housecleaning, feeding the young.''
Her husband, Tom, who works at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Williamsburg, took one look at the whole outfit and told her: ``It's like a jungle here now. With the kids and the birds and the dogs, all you need is a monkey. I wouldn't be at all surprised to come home one day and find a bear in the back yard.''
But even when the bills for cracked corn, bird seed, laying mash, vitamins, and hay grew to the thousands, he didn't complain. The birds were like a tonic.
``I don't get bored, I don't get lonesome, and I don't get depressed,'' Lawrence would say. ``Even with all the heavy problems, I don't get depressed.''
By all rights, Lawrence should be at least a little depressed.
For one thing, she can't get one bad memory out of her mind. It happened a summer day almost two years ago, when the grandchildren, whose families live in double-wide trailers on the property, were splashing in the pool behind the house.
Shelley, then 7, swam to the edge and looked up. Lawrence saw her eyes roll back. ``Help me, Granny,'' Shelley said, ``it hurts so bad.''
Lawrence helped her granddaughter out of the pool. The little girl's face turned ashen, and she held one small hand against her chest. Yet Shelley rallied quickly. Within a few minutes, she was running beside the pool.
Lawrence looks back now and sees that the episode in the pool was a horrible omen. Shelley got better then, but symptoms remained. She grew tired and out of breath. Eventually, she had seizures.
Shelley's mom found it hard to talk to the doctors about Shelley's condition, and so she didn't describe the symptoms clearly enough for the cardiologist to read them over the phone.
``Bring her on over to Richmond if you want to,'' he told her. ``But I'm sure she's fine. She could just be having growing pains.''
When Lawrence and Shelley's mother, Kim, arrived with Shelley at the hospital an hour later, doctors had to rush to save the little girl's life. A surgeon wasn't on hand to perform the emergency valve surgery Shelley needed, so she was sent to the University of Virginia.
She had undergone open-heart surgery when she was 2. Now, at 7, she would go through it a second time. Before the surgery, the cardiologist predicted Shelley's odds of survival at 1 or 2 out of 10.
Shelley beat those odds. But just a few weeks ago, Lawrence could sense that the old symptoms were returning.
``I've been living an intuitive lifestyle all my life,'' she says. ``You just get these little feelings, and then you have to do something.''
Even though her doctors told her the valve replacement should last Shelley into adulthood, Lawrence saw things differently. She checked with Shelley's mother. She perceived it too.
Doctors' examinations revealed two leaking valves, and the prognosis was grim: Soon the leakage in the valves would put so much stress on Shelley's heart that it would fail, and doctors would have to operate again. It could be a week, it could be a month, it could be a year.
So Lawrence, and all the rest of the family living on the hill with the turkeys and the geese and the emus and the pigeons, waits. Shelley keeps getting on the school bus in the mornings, and everybody tries to keep from watching her too closely.
``I try not to think about it a lot, but I worry, and Shelley sees it in my face,'' Lawrence says. ``Part of it is pity. I just feel so sorry she has to go through it again.''
On a recent cloudy morning, while Lawrence talked, Jaspar, her big German shepherd, ran his face under her hand, and she stroked him. The rheas kept pace with Lawrence from behind their fence as she walked along. Everything outside seemed to respond to the sound of Lawrence's voice.
It's a reciprocal arrangement. Her animals depend on her, follow her where they can. In turn, even now, when the worry gets almost too hard to bear, Lawrence relies on her animals, gathering strength from the simple rhythms of the sanctuary she has created.
``You have to have an open mind to life in general,'' she says, ``whether it's a duck, a chicken or a child. Everything wants to live. Everything just wants to survive. Sure, I'm worried about my grandbaby, but she's strong. She'll make it. Lord, I'll be right there when she needs me. I'll hold her hand, and she'll make it.
``The only thing that matters to me is life.''
And that, she believes, is an Easter story worth relating. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Richard L. Dunston
Peggy Lawrence, who syas that "animals will show you the
fundamentals of life," has 23 turkeys on her property.
At Right: Lawrence plays with her 2 and one-half- year-old emu,
Emma, at her aviary in Lanexa.
Photo by RICHARD L. DUNSTON\The Virginian-Pilot
Peggy Lawrence's horse, Bally, sees eye to eye with Emma the emu,
which has an adjoining pen.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE
by CNB