The Chickens

What’s a farm without chickens?  We picked up some Arkansas chicks and they laid blue and green eggs.  We mixed them up with a brown rooster and the eggs were then all different colors, pink, brown even sometimes white.  The color of the hen determines the color of the eggs. 

We put the chickens in the solarium, which was at the end of the former chicken coup, where they could be warmed by the heat lamp and could cozy up in the empty flower bed crates.  I thought they’d be safer there than in the chicken coup which was a bit open onto the yard and some fox might get them.  In the remembering of it I realize how ludicrous my request was to my neighbor, Alison. I asked her how to clean the chicken coup floor, because there was linoleum in the solarium and it was getting rather dirty, even though I had covered it with sawdust.  Alison didn’t know what to say because chicken coups had dirt floors and she never cleaned hers.  That’s what you get for living in the country when you come from the city.  

One day Don came in with a dead frozen chicken.  He reminded me of Monty Python who was returning a dead parrot and flopped the stiff corpse on the counter.  He explained the chicken had fallen out of the solarium and had gotten stuck between the wall and some fencing and froze to death.  Poor chicken.