I'm Stuck With A Chicken

Do you have anything in your home that's not your favorite thing? That's not your thing at all and yet...yet you feel you have no choice but to keep it? No choice but to look at it, protect it, dust it...somehow find a way of making it fit in with the rest of your things even if it doesn't?

And, as if that weren't enough, you know you're stuck with it til your dying day?

(sorry about the picture quality. It's the only picture I have of my chicken at the moment.)

I love birds. Crows, Great Blue Herons, Canadian Geese, the Tufted Titmouse, Brown Thrashers, woodpeckers....

There are some birds I don't like. Vultures for instance. Another one? Chickens. They are noisy, smelly, ignorant birds. In my humble opinion, the only thing they're good for is eating. (Yes, I know, eggs. But we eat their eggs, don't we?)

But using chickens as part of my decorating scheme? Um, no thank you. I'm not a chicken person.

Having said all that, I will now tell you about a chicken that's come home to roost. (It's actually a rooster but let's not split feathers.)

As you may recall from previous posts, my dad died of lung cancer in 2002. One morning, about a year before he died, my dad called me.

Hey Jude, how would you like a chicken?

A chicken?

Yeah. I have a metal chicken who needs a home. I bought him for our church to use as a mascot at their men's retreats but they don't want him. (Don't even ask me what that was all about.) I can't just dump him. Would you take him? He needs a good home and naturally I thought of you.

Ummm...sure dad. I'll take him.

About a week later the chicken arrived. He was packaged with as much tender loving care and bubble wrap as a chicken could ask for. And, as much as I hate to admit it, I like this chicken. He's my favorite color, and he has a sparkly, marble eye that catches the light when you look at it from just the right angle. He lives on the shelf I told you about last month. (It seems fitting the two should live together since dad gave me both of them, don'tcha think?)

Sometimes I'm tempted to add a disclaimer to my chicken. I want to make a pretty little label and dangle it from his tail for all to see. The label would read:

I am a chicken. I know that and you know that.

Judy wants you to know that while chickens are

not her thing, I am. Her dad, for some unknown

reason, wanted us to be together. He knew Judy

would take good care of me and never let me go.

For some reason, I was important to her dad,

so he asked her to care for me. Her dad

is gone; he is safely Home, waiting for her to

someday join him. In the meantime, she has me to

enjoy; A crazy, metal chicken that reminds her of

her dad. I am both a mystery and a hug. She is

happy to be stuck with me.