Last time I boiled some eggs, I noticed something different about
them. The shell was stamped with the words “Born Free.” Very puzzling.
Are eggs “born” when they are laid, or does the “borning” take place at
hatching? Hmmm.
Turns out Born Free is a company in Watertown,
Mass., that packages and sells cage-free eggs (another puzzling
concept—isn’t it the chickens, not the eggs, that are cage-free?).
All this musing about eggs and chickens reminded me
of my grandmother’s chickens. Though I was raised in the city, my
grandparents lived in the country. In addition to chickens, my
grandmother’s menagerie included, at various times, pigs, sheep, cows
and a goat named Davy Crockett.
When the cousins gathered in the country for a
visit, we’d play on top of the cellar, a great place except for one
problem: You had to walk through the chicken yard to get there. Most of
the chickens were docile enough, but mixed in with the brood were some
that had less than pleasant beginnings—they were our Easter chickens.
Having been dipped in dye as chicks, they weren’t too fond of humans,
and kids were easy targets. As you raised the latch on the chicken yard
gate, you needed to carefully scan the area for any nearby Easter
chickens—easy to spot because these mostly white birds, as adolescents,
still had purple dye tips on their feathers. Then you’d run like the
dickens for the cellar roof. If you weren’t fast enough, the chickens
would charge, and if they got too close, they’d flog you. (For you
city-slickers out there, that’s when they jump on you and beat you with
their wings while pecking away with their pointy little beaks.)
OK, OK, I know. They had a rough childhood. But an
attack by a chicken is enough to make a chicken out of anyone.
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