My family moved from a large city to a very, very small town when I was just a little girl. There was a learning curve.
On Day One, I had filled my journal with things exciting new realizations such as:
- Cows don’t use toilets.
- Pickles are created by man.
- Strawberries don’t grow on trees.
- Weeping willows don’t actually cry.
On Day Two, I learned about chickens, from the ones who lived on our land– “household chickens”, the previous owners described them, as if that made any sense at all.
Fifteen of them lived in a dirty-smelling, wire coop the size of a small bedroom that opened up into a larger free-range lot of land.
My siblings and I took one look at their home and decided to rescue them from a life of squalor. We found an empty barn on the other side of the farm and imagined that they’d be quite happy there, with taller ceilings and a floor free of hay and chicken feed. They’d even have real doors with working knobs.
Free at last!
We went to work immediately.
All 6 of us kids ran into the coop at full speed, with a half-hatched plan to transport as many chickens as we could catch in my brother’s brand new BMW.
It wasn’t long before we were rethinking whether or not these chickens deserved to be saved at all.
They tore through our clothes and scratched our skin. All the while we kept screaming, “We’re the good guys!”, sure that their panic was a post traumatic stress issue.
15 minutes into our efforts, I was the only one who had put a chicken in the car.
We decided to take a break.
Mom saw us– bloodied and sweating– and went into an uproar. We explained the situation and she listened, sputtering the whole while, and then forbade us from messing with the chickens anymore.
There was a lecture here– something about how the chickens liked where they were living, possible illness and lice from being in a coop with open wounds, the benefits of hay and chicken seed flooring for chicken-well-being, the sins of committing a raid on any home (even a chicken home), and other important things.
To be honest, I don’t remember all the details, because the whole thing was interrupted by the sound of my brother’s BMW purring to life. We ran outside just in time to see our captured chicken move from petty upholstery-vandalism to carjacking.
We acted quickly.
My brother was able to save the car from rolling down the hill, and my mom competently and easily removed the chicken. On the way back to her coop, the little criminal took one last swipe at me when I wasn’t looking, scarring me across the back of my arm.
In case the scar healed one day, I made a careful note in my learning journal, in my very best cursive:
Never turn your back on a chicken.
What a fowl way to learn a lesson.
