Valentine Mortalis

I romanticized owning chickens.

Before we owned any, I day-dreamed about fuzzy chicks peeping under a heat-lamp and how they'd grow into beautiful egg-laying hens.  The self-sufficiency, the daily, fresh eggs, and later the hormone-free meat, it all sounded so idyllic .  Better for your health, better for your palate, and better for the chickens.  I also thought it would be a wonderful learning experience for my kids.  I imagined my boys chasing hens around the back yard, helping to feed and water them, and collecting eggs from the coop on sunny afternoons.  There would be a special bird or two, the ones who were more like pets and would approach us for a cuddle.  We'd give those ones cute names like Henny Penny or Lila.

As with most things in life, reality doesn't look an awful lot like the imagined version.  It's like my mind only conjures skeletons.  The fleshing out of actual experience isn't always glorious.  Chicks are small and cute for a short amount of time before they are awkward looking and three times their original size, but still need to be kept warm indoors, at which point they start to unalterably stink.  Chickens lay eggs wonderfully and plentifully until the chickens molt for the first time and then production is never the same, but you still purchase the same amount of feed at Tractor Supply.  Chickens can roam free in your yard, but then they poop freely over your yard and the neighbor's dog is free to snatch a few on a whim, so you opt to fence them in.  If you fence them in, they won't be as happy or friendly and therefore won't be much like pets, and anyway with little boys on the naming squad, you end up with Chonko-Boppo instead of Henny Penny.  In the end, you have home-grown meat and feel exceptionally self-relient, but the process of getting that meat from flying around the coop to stacked in your freezer leaves you wondering why you ever romanticized owning chickens.

At least that's been my experience.

And then it was the most romantic week of the year, filled with glitter, flowers, and chocolate, secret plans to woo and win, and children's giddy excitement for a sugar overload.  On February 13th, after a morning of valentine festivities at the nursery school, and fetching a boy off the afternoon bus, I made my way to the coop to collect eggs.  The coop was full of our ten chickens, finding their place to perch for the night.  The luster of four round shells shone brightly above the dim dusky evening,  two in the top boxes and two underneath.  I fetched the two above before bending for the two below.  Just in front of the bottom boxes, perfectly in the way of my egg retrieval, a chicken had chosen to lay for the evening --not an uncommon thing for a broody, but I knew our winter chickens were not broody.  I didn't stop to puzzle long though, the sun was fading.  Moving a docile chicken is not a difficult task.  Just as my hands folded around the hen, I realized she was not sleeping.  My blood froze, hands inches from her feathers, eyes barely making out the scene.  She was surrounded by dark feathers and she was headless.

I turned on my heels and rushed to my home, leaving the door to the coop ajar and the remaining eggs in their boxes.  PTB arrived home shortly thereafter and I stuttered an explanation for my disquietude.  He graciously visited the coop to remove our deceased hen and retrieve the eggs.  We weighed the probability of various suspects and only came to the conclusion that it probably wasn't a dog.  That left a long list of other possibilities.

Though the coop is fenced in, and the opening is a few feet off the ground, an ambitious intruder could find a way around both obstacles.  The most secure precaution is to close up that opening at night, but when winter is raging and the wind throws us into negative numbers, sometimes a flashlighted trip out to the coop seems beyond endurability.  As winter waxed on we became less and less inclined to be precautionary and often left the chicken-entry inside the fence open to the night.  We knew we were partially responsible for the previous night's offense.  Not wanting a repeat, we determined to be more vigilant about closing up their coop at night.

The next day, of course, was Valentine's Day.  After a day, followed by an evening, of more heart-filled festivities, it was time to close up the coop.  It was late and dark.

"I'll come with you, just in case you run into whatever killed our chicken," I said to my valentine who was suiting up in hat, jacket, and boots.  I was joking.  We both laughed, but I still threw on my coat and followed him out the door.

Both of our flashlights clicked on as we rounded the corner of the house and traveled down the worn path leading to the coop.  PTB stopped at the human door to go inside for eggs, I continued on past the coop to the other side of the fence so I could go in and close up the chicken-entry to their coop.  Before I made it to the fence opening, I turned to look at PTB who was next to the door, but instead of seeing him I saw two beady eyes on the ground next to him.  I don't remember what I said to draw his attention to the possum at his feet.  It was something alarming, I am sure, because alarm was bubbling up in my throat.  There was a quick exchange about what we should do, but our conclusion came quickly.  (What would you do if the culprit of a heinous crime came back to re-commit?  And what would you do if you didn't own a gun?)

I held things: flashlight, shovel, hatchet, cinder block, and passed them or steadied them as directed.  He told me not to watch.  I only looked a few times.  It was an intense few minutes for me, much more harrowing for my valentine whose job it was to exact death without a gun.  And then it was over.  The possum was over.  Our valentine's night date was over.  Any romantic notions I still held onto about owning chickens, they were over, too.