LESSONS I'VE LEARNED IN THE CHICKEN COOP

Don’t Get Fooled By a Slick Talking Rooster Type: 

Chicken sex is part of the ambiance and romance of having a hobby farm. It’s random. It’s funny. It’s constant.

Our Mac daddy Americanus rooster, Roadie, is a gorgeous example of why hens just can’t say no. Mostly because they have brains the size of peas (thus the term pea brained) and really short memories.

Roadie is a lover-boy. His favorite seal-the-deal strategy is to fake finding a juicy worm or chubby grub and then make lovely clucky noises that being interpreted mean, come over hear you darling plump hens and share this lovely chubby grub with me. Cluckity, cluck, bock, bock, yum . . .

And those hens come running—every single time—twenty times a day. While they’ve got their heads down expecting to find a crisp cricket dinner, he jumps them. Twenty. Times. A. Day.

Seriously?  Sometimes I want to yell at my hens, “He’s lying to you. He’s a liar. There’s no grub, worm, or cricket. He just wants in your pants. AGAIN!”

They never learn, but then again they’re chickens with peas for brains.

Side Note: If the fake cricket scam doesn’t work he stretches one wing to the ground and prances like a court jester. The hens dazzled by his magnificence forget what they were doing. Then he jumps them.

When I was a kid we had a pair of roosters that used to tag team the hens. One would pin the poor gal’s head to the ground while the other one well . . . jumped her, and then they would switch. It was like having a pair of serial rapists running amok in the barn. Then there was the hen that was blind in one eye and how they used to sneak up on her bad side. Eagles murdered those nasty roosters, reducing them to two piles of bloody feathers. It was hard to feel bad.

Moral of the story:  Get the cricket up front.

Hens Squabbling With Other Hens Does Not Pay:

Our hens squabble. They want to lay their eggs in the same nest at the same time so they sit on each other. Some pecking may be involved. Or they occasionally argue over a lovely bit of greenery in the yard. Bok. Bok. Cluckity. Step off, you clucking piece of . . . Bok!

Roadie the Mac Daddy Rooster hears them fighting, knows they’re distracted, races over, and then jumps on one or all.

Sigh.

The Moral of the Story:  Folks who want us to believe that we are no different than the animals in my chicken coop should spend some time in my chicken coop.

Here’s the truth of it. I only need one rooster for a whole flock of ditzy hens. Heads up gentlemen.

Linda (Henny Penny) Zern   

  

  

        

PILLOWS BY SHERWOOD (MY BELOVED HUSBAND)

My husband is a remarkably intelligent man. He can compute, upload, download, code, flowchart, and speak acronym. But for thirty years he's been pretending to botch putting the pillows on the bed. It's a dodge. It's a ploy. It's the hope that I'll get tired of trying to get him to place the pillows nicely on the bed. It's a game where he tries to act so stupid that I'll give up and put the pillows on the fetching bed myself.

I won't.  Give up that is.

Well played Sherwood Zern. Well played.

And happy Father's Day.    

STILL LICKING THE FLAPS

The cell phone in my hand grew dank with hand sweat as I talked to Staff Sergeant Aric Zern who was calling from somewhere, just outside of Kirkuk, Iraq.

 “. . . so then Conner-Boy asked Zoe, ‘Why is the sky blue?' and then Zoe Baye said, ‘Because, Conner, Heavenly Father knows that blue is your favorite color and he made the whole sky just for you.’"

And then I said . . . oh, wait before that they did the funniest thing . . . ”

Rattling on, I talked happy talk to absolutely no one for approximately three additional minutes. I did not pause, breathe, or hesitate. I kept right on talking and talking and talking until the black hole of silence on the other end of the line tipped me off—my signal had been dropped from the dark side of some nifty space probe or satellite saucer or something else spacey.

  

“Aric, can you hear me?” I yelled into the phone.  “Come in, anyone. Anyone—Roger, Roger.”

The phone beeped cheerfully with an incoming call from a war zone in Iraq.

It was Aric, laughing. “I always know you’re still talking to absolutely no one when we get cut off, and then I call back, and it’s still busy.”

These are the moments which make me long for the days of tin cans, string, and rotary dials. I understood string. I understood cans. I understood numbers in a circle. Tin cans circling the earth, which get a big kick out of hearing me talk to myself, I don’t get.

On the subject of technology, did you know that when you submit a blog entry online, people can leave comments at the end of your submission? There’s these conveniently placed boxes where people can respond to what you’ve written; I had no idea. I just figured it out.  It’s exciting to write words and then have people write words about your words. The possibilities remain endless, as endless as the far reaches of the space circling around our fair planet where large metal cans are waiting to drop your calls or record your every thinking moment.

However, I continue to feel a deep shame and unremitting dopiness over my inability to play a movie on the X-box or cheat in school on my cell phone.

In response to my complaining loudly about my endless struggles with the mysteries of the foreign language known as algebra and a looming math test, a young fellow classmate (we’ll call him Nimrod) whipped a cell phone from his pants pocket.

Nimrod, displaying the lighted panel of his excellent mobile phone said, “I always cheat. It’s easy.” 

He began to punch a series of numbers resembling a sequence from the Dresden Mayan Codex. I squinted, trying to follow his dancing fingers.

He continued to text message mysterious numbers and letters. The phone beeped and then chirped. He waved it overhead.

“Just keep your phone in your sock during the test. See?!”

I smiled benignly and patted his boney shoulder. 

“Nimrod, sweetheart, first of all, you’re assuming I know how to text message, and second of all, you probably don’t realize arthritis makes it difficult for me to do anything with a phone while it’s in my sock.”

He smiled sadly, his disappointment visible.

I added, “Besides the fact, I wouldn’t feel comfortable cheating and thereby selling my soul for a lousy grade in a lousy math class.” 

I could tell that in Nimrod’s worldview, I had ceased to exist as a sentient being.

It’s hard not to feel that the world has passed me by when my fifteen-month old grandson can operate the DVD player better than I can, and crib notes are now downloaded to a student’s sock via a satellite orbiting somewhere over Kirkuk, Iraq. 

I weep with shame. Oh, and don’t tell anyone, but I still use stamps and send real letters—in envelopes, through the mail, via the United States Post Office, after I lick the glue on the flaps, with my tongue.

Linda (Happy Talker) Zern