Early this morning (around 5am) I was awaken by the chickens in our backyard. They were all loudly squawking at *something.” Now, this wasn’t the normal morning wake-up calls that one normally hears at the start of a new day, instead this was an all-out alarm letting the flock know that “DANGER WAS HERE.”
“Oh no,” I thought, as I hurriedly got dressed to go downstairs and check on them. “Something’s in the hen house.”
I saw nothing when I got to the coop. All of the chickens were lined up against one side looking out, but I saw nothing.Perhaps it had been a neighbor’s dog or a raccoon slowly going back to its bed before the sun fully came out. Don’t know.
What I did know was that all of my chickens were safe.
I debated whether to stay up and start my day but I decided to go back to bed to see if I could sleep for another hour. Apparently I fell asleep because I soon started dreaming about our chickens.
I dreamed that they had been squawking in the henhouse (just like in real life) and when I went to check on them, I found four that had been killed and dragged out of the henhouse by some kind of predator.
In my dream, I kept calling for my bird Charlie. She wasn’t one of the ones who had been killed and yet I couldn’t find her in the henhouse. It looked like my Charlie was lost and I was in a frenzy.
And then I woke up to a quiet house and a quiet backyard.
I don’t share this dream for you to analyze (it’s clear where the original idea for it came from and I’m sure my search for Charlie goes beyond looking for a lost bird), but I am sharing it with you to show that my chickens have made their way into my subconscious.
In the truest sense of the word, these birds have become an integral and important part of who I am. My hands, my heart, my flock.
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Wendy Thomas writes about the lessons learned while raising children and chickens in New Hampshire. Contact her at [email protected]
Also, join me on Facebook to find out more about the flock (children and chickens) and see some pretty funny chicken jokes, photos of tiny houses, and even a recipe or two.
