We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the crazy cat lady. Nineteen individually named cats have the run of the house, relegating the ostensible owner to the status of prisoner in her own home. Fur and hairballs cover every horizontal surface. The place reeks of urine and poop. For obvious reasons, visitors are few and far between.
I crossed a similar threshold this week. My name is Paul and I’m a crazy chicken guy.
Here's how I know.
Tuesday morning. 4 a.m. I was up early and reading in the living room when the storm hit. Thunder. Lightning. A torrential downpour.
Of course my thoughts turned to “the girls.”
I knew Snow, Nellie and Hope were snug and dry in their coop. But their pen was uncovered, open to the downpour. Unless I threw a tarp over it, pronto, the hens would land in a sea of mud when I let them out at dawn. (The ground in the pen is bare; the grass that once grew there is long gone, thanks to the hens' incessant scratching and pecking.)
So I donned a headlamp and a slicker, headed out to the garage to grab a tarp, and trudged through the pouring rain to the back of our lot. As the lightning flashed and the thunder pealed, I draped the tarp over the pen and weighed it down with bricks at the corners. Chickens being extremely sound sleepers, the hens didn’t budge from their roost in the coop as I tackled my soggy chore outside.
An hour or so later, I headed back out to the coop to release the girls. The ground in the pen was almost completely dry by then, unlike the surrounding terrain. As for the hens, they were none the wiser about my nocturnal visit, and too preoccupied with gobbling down their breakfast to pay much attention to the comfy state of their domain.
But I was well aware of what I had done. I knew there was no room for doubt anymore. My name is Paul and I’m a crazy chicken guy. Is there a 12-step program for that?
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