Today, we took Grandma to Chicken Annie’s for her birthday. It’s a ritual we’ve enacted many times in her eighty-six years. It's always the same road, the same parking lot full of cars with local plates, the same smell of fried chicken and nostalgia that greets us at the door. My brother and I sat next to her, my parents across from her, the five of us framed by the patterned chicken wallpaper that’s been there longer than I can remember. Somewhere between the mashed potatoes and the chicken wings, I found myself studying those chickens on the wall, rows upon rows of them, each frozen mid-strut or mid-crow. And then I thought of Itō Jakuchū’s Fowls (1761).
Jakuchū’s painting is alive in a way that wallpaper, by its nature, cannot be, yet the repetition of both speaks to the same impulse: the human desire to surround ourselves with life. Fowls is a riot of color and pattern, an impossible gathering of roosters, each rendered with obsessive precision. Their feathers are not simply painted but patterned, like scales of light and shadow, as though Jakuchū wanted to capture the very structure of vitality itself. When I look at it, I see not chaos, but an intricate choreography, each bird part of a greater, harmonious design.
There is something profoundly familial about that order. Sitting with Grandma, I realized that our annual meal, too, is a kind of painting: the same people, in nearly the same seats, repeating a ritual that has become almost ornamental in its predictability. Yet within that repetition, there’s life: new stories, subtle changes, laughter that grows softer or sharper with age. Just as Jakuchū’s roosters are distinct yet unified, our gatherings hold individuality and pattern in equal measure.
Jakuchū, who lived as a Buddhist painter in Edo-period Japan, believed in the sacredness of all living things. His art often walked the line between natural observation and spiritual revelation. To paint an animal was to pay homage to the animating spirit within it, to recognize the pulse of life in its feathers, its stance, its gaze. Sitting there under a canopy of wallpaper chickens, watching Grandma eat her birthday pie, I felt that same reverence. Not for the birds themselves, but for the simple act of being alive together, of returning again and again to the same table, the same laughter, the same world.
What Jakuchū understood — and what I am still learning — is that abundance need not be extravagant. It lives in the small, the familiar, the repeated. In the shimmer of feathers and the soft chatter of family. In the way a rooster crows, or a grandmother smiles when everyone finally settles into conversation. Fowls is not just a study of birds; it is a meditation on life teeming beyond the limits of comprehension, on life that fills a small-town restaurant on a November afternoon, where ritual and memory merge into art.