Life in the Coop
Masks go on, goggles or glasses are donned, and then you
take the plunge. Into the chicken coop you go, and you hope it’s better than it
sounds. Underneath your mask the smells are dampened, but these dulled ones are
amplified into some pleasant food, which really isn’t what you thought it was,
combined with dust and must. The shovel plunges into mess, and dirt and straw
are relieved from the chaos below, along with all those other parts which are
usually greeted with disgust. You dump, hold the garbage bag for the other
person to dump into, and it goes back around, and then occasionally scrape some
of the eww. Rabid kids make rain in the enclosure trying to blast away at the
cobwebs from outside, and the chickens will sometimes attempt to claim their home
indoors, and are politely shooed away at their dismay. But one wanders in and
decides to lay an egg, or at least we thought so, as we never got to see the
finished product.
At the herb garden I scraped away at scales, an ants’
consumer crop which really seemed more boils that affected citrus trees. The
ants got mad at our vandalism, but more likely got squashed in our unsuspecting
fingers. As we ended the day I wanted to stay at the garden, connected to the
earth, but parent anxiety made us be at PHS by 4:20. The chicken laid the egg
in her clean coop, the ants rebuilt with earnest, and I went home.
Rose: Hanging out with the chickens and doing their
housekeeping, along with the pleasure of everyone else saying eww . I’m sure
they were thankful, as I was, but the tip was nonexistent. Thorn: Scraping off
chicken feces. They’re sticky, smell much to earthly, and are extremely hard to
pry of hard surfaces.
~ Ian
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