My Pet Chicken

“Hey Grandma.  Do you want to see my chickens?

“Oh yes I do.”

“They should be right over here.  Oh well.  They must be in the back corner.”

“Oh these are the older chickens that you showed last year.  Are they still laying eggs?”

“Yes Mam they are still laying.  Oh here they are Grandma behind these shrubs. Come on babies.”

“Oh they are beautiful!  Have they started laying yet?”

“Probably will in February.  They are larger than the others were so they may lay by the end of January.”

“I think they are winners and as soon as you can measure them you will know for sure.  I love the color.”

This is the conversation I had with my granddaughter today about the new chickens she will show this spring in the 4-H competition.  I was reminded of my chickens and I asked her if she remembered the story about my pet chicken.  She laughed and said, “Yes I do Grandma.”

“Well I think I will tell the story tomorrow.”

“That’s good Grandma.”

This is the story of my pet chicken and unlike my granddaughter, I never named my chickens because I had a chicken house and a chicken house yard filled with them.  We ate the laying hen’s eggs and we ate the pullets.  The pullets were raised for consumption and their life span was merely less than a year.  You picked her up and decided if she was heavy enough with eating flesh to have her for lunch or supper.  Sometimes the smaller ones were crowded out at the feeding and they grew slower.

My pet chicken was a pullet.  She never missed a feeding and she only loved me because I had the feed.  When I opened the gate and sat down on the stoop she rushed to my lap and I fed her from my hand.  Day after day this ritual continued until on August eleventh when I was sent to help with the peach harvest.  That day my sister went to the chicken yard and you guessed it.  The pullet rushed to her and you can bet she was quite fat being hand fed. Naturally there was no other work needed except to extract her head, pluck her feathers, and clean her inside and out with the help of boiling water.

I was already ill from eating so many peaches and when I was called from the couch to the table for dinner I only had half of an appetite. 

One important thing to remember is the cold hard fact that secrets between the sexes does not exist when the sexes are siblings.  Nope.  I do not remember who ratted my sister out but one of those boys knew that pullet on the platter, fried all golden brown and being served with mashed potatoes, field peas, sweet corn, tomatoes, gravy and biscuits, was my pet chicken.  The announcement devastated me and I rushed back to the safety of my couch and continued to war with my internal fluids to remain in my digestive track. My heart was broken and my birthday, yep it was my birthday, was ruined.  Just ruined. 

I returned for the birthday cake but it was pretty disappointing also.  The moral of this story is to never have a pet chicken that you are not willing to give up for the chopping block or for the hen house laying party.  She was my last pet chicken.  She was the only pet chicken I ever had!