A Chicken Saga

Since I was twelve, I asked my mother for chickens every year for my birthday. First I negotiated for "just twenty" and eventually for "just two." I envisioned sauntering to a sweet, little coop each morning swinging a basket. When I'd unlatch the door to the coop, anywhere from two to twenty chickens would coo as I sang them that song that goes "rise and shine and give God your glory, glory." They'd levitate from their cozy nesting boxes –– allowing me to  reach in and lovingly gather  2 – 20 large, clean, warm eggs. I'd carry them back to the kitchen, where my mother would be cooking a banana bread.  She'd smile and say, "Oh, I'm so glad we decided to raise chickens in the end."

Well, I got my damn chickens a month ago when I moved into a co-op in Boulder.  I got chickens to the extent that I now share a bedroom with more than twenty of them. Practically. I say this because the coop is right outside my window, and these birds don't coo; they bicker and bitch so loudly I can't sleep past 6AM or concentrate  on even writing this. I bitch back at them. I'm cranky. I've become a chicken too, only I don't lay eggs for anyone. Shit.

But literally. The eggs are often covered in shit along with a sticky, unidentified substance I haven't "googled" yet.

To demystify my chicken fantasy even further:

My day to care for the chickens is Sunday (of course, chickens don't sleep in on Sundays). When I open the door to the coop, the whole gaggle of them come flocking at me as if there's an emergency. Is the little shed in which they brood on fire? No. But you'd think so. Naturally, I don't get the chance to sing them a jolly song. Sometimes,  I'll reach into the boxes expecting to grab an egg only to poke a hen that's laying. She'll twitch her head, puff up her feathers, and make a sound like chalk scraping on a blackboard. I'll turn around, and the others will be watching. I've seen Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds." I want to run, but I'm carrying eggs. I play it cool. As a side note, the eggs are not always large. Sometimes they are the size of gumballs.

And there's the time when I found one of the chickens dead. I've taken my friend on a mini field trip to the coop and am glorifying the whole deal when we look down and see two chickens pecking at a dead one. Jesus Christ. My friend and I exit the coop announcing the chicken's death.  At the time, an alcoholic named Sam is couch surfing at our house. He's standing in boxers on the porch holding a PBR and wearing a curly blonde wig he's pulled from our costume box. He staggers forward claiming that he'll "take care of it." He then halts, twirls one of his fake blonde locks and slurs, "My hair feels dry. First I need to condition it." Leaving Sam to ponder the dryness of his "hair," we begin the burial. But as soon as we start digging a hole in the ground next to the "garden" (nothing is actually growing because the chickens keep escaping and eating our vegetables) that one of my roommates is watering (he's in his underwear too), Sam bursts forward. He snatches our shovel and shouts, "It's my birthright to bury dead chickens!" And I'm officially living in a carnival, which has little to do with the chickens at this point.

And then there's the time I'm standing in the yard and a chicken who's escaped uses my head as a stoop to get back into the coop. The outside world was too much of a madhouse for her I guess . . .

So far, I haven't said anything heartening about our chickens. So here it is: what sparks within me wonder is the eggs' gradation of color. When you gather eggs that aren't covered in shit and that  unidentifiable sticky substance, they're anywhere from porcelain–white to raw umber colored. The other day, I gathered one that was tinted light blue.