a true tale of a chicken, a CPS worker, and a toilet plunger.

So I mentioned in my last post that I had bagged a hen as a mail-order bride for Randy the Rooster. But before I dropped her off to her connubial duties, I thought I’d give the 11-year old who was staying with us (along with her homeless mom) a view of a real live chicken.

(The kid’s Mom, whom I’ll call Frigga, was too gullible for my husband to resist. She was good for any hoary old joke, including the one where he points at her and exclaims, “Oh look, you have a henway!” To which poor unsuspecting Frigga responds, “What’s a henway?”

“About three pounds.” And Jay goes off laughing. Yes, I have put up with this kind of humor for over thirty years. Now you know why I seem a little nuts. But back to the matter at hand, and the Bantam hen, who, for the record, weighed a good deal less than three pounds.)

It’s only two in the afternoon when I come in with my lively sack, and nobody’s home. Our kids are grown, Frigga is out dealing with whatever, and her kid is still at school. So I find a cardboard box for show-and-tell, since a feed sack is no fit display for the glories of chickendom, and contemplate the various methods for transferring animated hen with already demonstrated flying skills into inanimate carton.

I un-knot the sack, then invert it over the box. Henrietta is in no mood to take a drop; she has her claws in the weave and clings like a burr. So I grasp the top of the sack in one hand and encircle the fabric with the other, moving steadily downward. Sure enough, she loses her grip and falls into the carton. “Clunk!”

Transfer accomplished, I toss the bag and slap the top shut. And then I think, “Wait a minute. What went ‘clunk? Chickens don’t go ‘clunk’. Unless—”

I open the top flap a bit, and sure enough, there in the gloom at the bottom of the box is a teeny little pearly white Bantam egg.

I cracked the carton a little wider to get a better look, and fall back, startled by a fusillade of feathers as Henrietta explodes out of the opening. She bounces off the ceiling and rockets down the hall, with me in hot pursuit.

To be continued…