(part 2)
The children got their very first chickens for Easter. Carmon brought them home, all cute and yellow
and fluffy. The pet store had tinted them with food coloring, so they were even more yellow and appealing than Mother Nature intended. I don’t know why parents
think that giving live animals as Easter gifts is a good idea. It certainly is high on my list of dumbest
things we ever did!
The first clue we had that this was a big mistake was how
Sess (then about age three) reacted.
I’m not sure what triggered it, but he decided that his chick needed a
bath. He and Beed (just turned 6) dragged a number
three washtub out onto the back patio and filled with water from the hose and
bubble bath from the bathroom. By the
time Carmon found out what they were up to, Beed and Sess were
dunking the baby chicks up and down in the suds, while Sess sang an off-key
rendition of The Bear Went Over the Mountain. Carmon rescued the chicks, dried them off,
and placed them in an incubator made out of a shoebox and a small light
bulb. The chicks lived, but the poor
things walked backward for a week!
I don’t know if it was Murphy’s Law or sweet revenge, but
those cute little chicks grew into the world’s two orneriest roosters. By the time summer arrived, they ruled the
back yard. Our two boys couldn’t go out
to play without being chased and pecked.
As the mother in the house, I can tell you that I wasn’t thrilled to
have them inside and underfoot all day long.
Tee was just a few months old and I looked forward to those rare
moments when she was asleep and the boys were outside so I could sit down and
put my feet up. Even Sess’ fourth
birthday party had to be held inside.
Carmon was less than sympathetic, but then he wasn’t the one cooped up
in the house all day with a baby, a pre-schooler, and a recent kindergarten
graduate! My pleas to get rid of those
roosters fell on the proverbial deaf ears.
The crowning insult happened one washday afternoon. Many people had automatic clothes driers in
those days, but I wasn’t one of them. I
had an energy-efficient solar clothes drier – in other words, a
clothesline. The line ran along the west
side of the house and it really was quite effective. On a summer’s day in the southwest, by the
time I had finished hanging a load of wash, the first items in the load were
already dry and sunshine fresh! This
worked particularly well with cloth diapers, of which, needless to say, I had a
lot.
Carmon had strung some chicken wire between the house and
the fence along the southwest corner of the yard in order to keep the roosters
away from the clothesline. His idea had
worked well when the chicks were still young and small. Unfortunately, like all living things, the
chicks grew up. You know how the entire
theme of the movie, Chicken Run, was built around the premise that
chickens can’t fly? That may be true
over long distances or when a fictional Mrs. Tweedy is waiting to turn them
into chicken pies, but for short distances and when driven by a perverse
desire for revenge after having been dyed yellow and bathed in Mr. Bubble,
roosters can fly.
So there I was, with two little boys squabbling in the kitchen, a baby fussing to be fed, and every diaper in the house (except the one Tee was wearing) in the wet wash basket ready to be hung. I was a quick draw with a clothespin, so I decided to hang the wash first in the hopes that the diapers would be dry by the time I had finished feeding the baby. I was flying down the line of wash in record time when I was attacked. Without warning, in a whir of feathers and loud squawks, both roosters sailed over that pitiful little fence. With neck feathers ruffed, they pecked and spurred my feet, ankles, and legs. I tried shooing them away, but that was about as effective as shooing a swarm of angry bees. I finally had no recourse but to drop the basket of wash and run for my life into the house. I tried several times that afternoon to retrieve the wash, but the roosters were in that war for the duration. At the slightest crack in the door, the squawking resumed as the roosters attacked the screen. That was it! This was war! I had one nerve left, and those roosters had jumped right in the middle of it! I didn’t know how I was going to win, but I knew that somebody was leaving and it wasn’t going to be me!
That evening, when Carmon came home from work, he found two
scared sons, a wet baby, and a wife with blood in her eyes. This was Waterloo and I was Wellington! I won’t go into the painful details. Suffice it to say that by nightfall, Tee
had dry diapers, the boys had their play yard, I had my clothesline, and we all
had fried chicken for dinner the next day.
© Gebara Education,
2001. No portion of this book may be
copied by any method without the express written permission of the author
Picture of baby chicks from www.backyardchickens.com
Picture of #3 washtub from www.factorydirectcraft.com
Picture of diapers on the clothesline from www.simplehomemade.net
Picture of two roosters fighting (a cruel pastime, by the way) from www.thepeoplesvoice.org
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