Not a cloud nor a chicken to be seen!
It wasn’t so much that we invited the girls to lunch but, once they discovered us, we couldn’t in good conscience just ignore them. I was about half-way through my tuna fish (with home made mayo) sandwich when… here they came! They were running hell bent for election right toward our picnic table.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing a chicken run, flat-out, I do want to invite you to come by just as soon as the sheltering is over. It is one of the most smile-producing spectator sports ever — obviously what backyards and free range chickens were invented for. In fact, it’s hysterical.
Lunchtime!
So, here they came, and I just couldn’t not invite them, if you know what I mean. I left my tunafish sandwich and went into the kitchen, dumped some small curd cottage cheese in a pie tin and scurried out with it. As I had feared, there was Little Red Hen ON the table closely considering my sandwich!
“And where was Farmer Nyel?” you might ask.
He was sitting right there laughing his arse off! I didn’t have to say a word to either of them. Nyel stopped laughing as soon as I stepped out onto the porch. It took a minute for LRH to realize that she’d been busted but then down she hopped. Nonchalantly, in fact. Cheeky chicken!
An After-Lunch Sunbath
I had a mind to ban her from the cottage cheese. But, of course I didn’t. Girls will be girls and all three absolutely loved their lunch. One odd thing, though. Every four or five bites, each one would stop eating and wipe her beak back and forth a few times on the grass. I wondered if their beaks got stuck up with the cottage cheese. Or maybe their nostrils got clogged.
Whatever was going on, it didn’t seem to slow them down much. They finished their lunch — Clean Plate Club Perfect!– before Nyel and I had finished the second halves of our sandwich. I have the feeling, we’re in for full-family-picnics from now on.
How true in terms of seeing chickens run “full speed ahead”. As kids we used to love
trying to sprinkle the food or some such thing just to see them in their sprint mode.
We had one, that I think, our grandmother gave us when they moved off the farm, that would eat out of our hands and come when we called her. Because of that she was quite “chubby” so the run was more of a waddle.
All things PEEPS from me are now finished until next year.