The Chicken Farmer

Last winter my mother decided to become a chicken farmer. Yesterday she found one of her flock dead in the pen. These are coddled chickens. My dad’s Home Health Aid calls them “city chickens”, their sole job to lay one egg each per day, so my dad can have fresh eggs for his daily breakfast omelette. The hen’s death upset my mother. She was despondent when she told me, worryingly so.

We met the girls last February in the dead and dark of winter. Mom’s local Agway ordered four baby chicks for her. She raised them under a heat lamp in the basement. The house I grew up in is old and our basement is really a cellar, the floor only cemented over when I was in my teens. Prior to that it was old boards and dirt.

The smell from the baby chicks came up through the floor into the TV room where my parents spend much of their days. It was overpowering if you weren’t used to it, but my mother didn’t seem to notice. She was intent on becoming a chicken farmer, and she and my father spent hours researching and reading about raising chickens. It was a hopeful time. They had a new interest, something to keep their minds off my father’s confinement to a wheelchair and other accumulated sadnesses that come with living a long time.

When the weather got warm enough the girls were moved outdoors to a brand new henhouse also from the local Agway, the best one they sold my mother declared. It was a happy time. Much like my parents, chickens rise and sleep with the sun. They cluck hello the way a cat mews and purrs. They’re social farm animals. Mom worried if the hens had enough shade, if their run was big enough. She fed them on lots of greens, and kept a vigilant eye out for eggs. The chicks grew into beautiful chickens. On hot summer days my dad powered his wheelchair out in the yard to chat with them and watch them hop around their pen. Finally they started producing eggs, eggs like golden nuggets. My mother shared them with her closest friends and family. If you got an egg, it was special. She declared herself a real chicken farmer. Life was good - enough.

When the girls’ run needed to be moved this autumn (you have to do that periodically with chickens), my husband and I scheduled a day to move the henhouse and the chicken run to another location in the yard closer to the house and easier to get to in winter. My mother called the day before to tell me we couldn’t do it after all. My father’s Home Health Aide, who does so much more than provide daily care for my dad, wasn’t going to be able to come. Oxana was going to be the one to pick up the chickens and put them in the new run. My mother has an irrational fear of all winged creatures, big or small. She loves to look at them but she will not touch them. She becomes particularly agitated if they fly in her direction. 

I assured my mother I was a chicken whisperer. I would have no problem picking up four chickens and carrying them to a new location less than 100 feet away. She was skeptical, and reluctantly agreed I could move them. She would watch. I whispered to the chickens and they were moved. Fall was unseasonably cold and wet this year and the wet lasted well into December. Mom’s daily schedule is to check for eggs gave them their mid-morning snack at eleven. They get another check/snack at three, but yesterday when she went out for three o’clock snack, one of the girls was lying dead on the frozen dirt on the floor of the pen. 

I never saw the dead chicken. My mother disposed of her quickly. My father wanted an autopsy. Maybe they could find out what she died from, but my mother angrily refused. She had failed. She’d lost 25% of her flock. No successful chicken farmer has that kind of track record. 

This “failure” diminished her. Not in the way my brother’s suicide diminished her, and not in the way the loss of my father’s ability to walk or to stand has diminished her, but it was another data point on the timeline. I was at a loss. The hens represented so much. They were a symbol of life, of hope, warm summer days, the future. 

This morning I woke before four thinking about the chickens. I don’t know where this will end. Raising chickens is illegal within village limits where my parents live, so in raising them they are renegades, lawbreakers. The henhouse doesn’t seem sturdy enough to withstand the long, harsh Central New York winter and now I’m worried, too. But, I’m rooting for the girls and I’m rooting for my mother because you have to hold onto hope. And, sometimes hope looks like a lot like chickens.