Ode to the Chicken People

Monday, September 15, 2008
8:35 p.m.

Current mood: content Category: Blogging I am a chicken person. Yes, there is a select group of people who own and love their chickens. and I don't mean with a side of fries... I mean we love our chickens! They are our pets. They have names, personalities, likes/dislikes and favorite foods. Our chickens follow us around our backyards/farms/stables like little dogs, they come when called, they talk to us. After losing all my "Ladies" so horribly in July last year, I grieved, yes, grieved people......for my loss. I was the last person who should have found them the way I did, I knew as I walked towards the coop in the pitch black that they were lost to me and I have refused to walk back to the coop ever since. Yet I still start toward my backdoor, crumbs in hand to throw, before remembering they aren't there. I even ask my husband, albeit infrequently, if he heard Booster the Rooster crowing....so call me haunted. Even at the Fair last week, I bit back tears as I walked through the chicken pens with Macady. (I'd luckily avoided these every other day I was there.) So when my friend called me the other day to ask if I could re-home some hens, what else could I say? Scott cleaned out the coop, I filled the old watering unit, thinking of feed, water heaters, the scraps that will not go to waste again... My little coop is in full swing and soon I'll have fresh, brown, speckly, warm, beautiful eggs to gather, a crowing rooster and little ladies who cluck and talk in their own little way. I am a chicken lady, and a happy one at that.