Southern Sampler - by Alma Womack
Late Summer Miscellany
Oh, the thought of September: possibly cooler days, the smell of fall in the air, fresh-picked cotton, SEC football, and rusty colored cypress trees. Oh, the thought; and thought is all it is for now, for I am writing this in August, and all it is—is HOT. Hot and dry, hot and rainy, hot and miserably hot, and this will be the fourth month of this misery. May, usually a month of some coolness warming up to hot by June, started and ended hot. June, July, and August dreadfully hot; it’s so hot my weeds are wilting in the midday sun. It’s so hot, I don’t even want to mow, and mowing is my favorite pastime.
My friends since childhood, Carolyn Huffman, Jan McLain, and Francis Pugh, and I went for our annual party barge ride in late July. Francis has a party barge and pier at her home in Parhams, and she is the skipper and the hostess for what we try to have as an annual ride all around Black River Lake. This year we were successful in getting together with plenty of goodies and drinks and way plenty of conversation to fill the day. This time, we pretty much had the lake to ourselves, and there were no thundershowers to run us in too soon. The breeze from the movement of the boat and the cooling effects of the water made for a most comfortable day. We all look forward to this day, for we have been friends since first grade; and though our busy lives don’t allow us to get together too often, we make up for lost time when we do have a day to ourselves.
Here on the home front, I have another foolish chicken story to relate. Just when I think everything is calm, Mother Nature fouls me again, no pun intended. This is the latest chicken story:
Sunday, July 25, we had a real treat at Trinity Presbyterian in Jonesville; for our good friend and fellow elder, Tom Milliken of Ferriday, came to be the speaker for church services. Even though Buster goes to church at Pisgah in Manifest, I invited him to come to hear Tom speak. Tom has been Buster’s physical therapist since he became paralyzed in 2007, and they are buddies. Tom played a large part in getting Buster back on his feet, so he holds a special place in my heart.
Anyway, we were about to leave for church when I spied my rooster standing in the front yard. The dogs were watching me get in the wrong vehicle and had not seen this very foolish fowl whose life was in danger even though he was too stupid to know it. I knew if I got out and walked towards him, the dogs would kill him before I could stop them. Saving his life would have to be a stealthy operation.
I told Buster to stay in the truck and keep it running while I went back in the house and slipped out the front door. The dogs would hopefully wait there in the carport for my return. Easing out the front door, I went over to the rooster and quietly shooed him toward the chicken pen, holding my breath the whole time.
He got right up to the opened gate, turned around, and ran the other way. I had to chase him around the pen and back to the gate where he politely hopped in. The gate and door were both shut, so he had to have flown out. But I got him in and breathed a sigh of thankful relief. Then I noticed that there were only two hens where there had been three yesterday. I had already lost two hens last week, and now another was missing. I found her body in the roost room, but had to leave her to keep from being too late for church. The awful truth hit me: my chickens hadn’t just died; they’d been murdered.
Later that afternoon, Larry Crouch came down, for he and Buster had planned to go somewhere. I told him about the dead hens, so he laid down a plan right then. He would come back with some traps to catch whatever was after the chickens. He got back here a little before dark with the traps; and when we went to set them in the chicken yard, I spied that ignorant rooster up in one of the crepe myrtle trees. All the dogs were with me, so I had to get them to follow me all the way to the pool house on the other side of the yard so I could lock them up while we got the rooster back in the pen to clip his wing to keep him from flying out again.
At this point, I was about to decide to just buy eggs, tear down the fence, and make the chicken house a storage facility. The crazy things are sometimes just too much trouble. But all was set right, the rooster and the hens were allowed to settle down, and the dogs were freed from the pool house where one of them had politely thrown up the potato chips I fed them to trick them inside. I cleaned up that mess and went back to see if Larry needed any help with the traps. He didn’t, so we were leaving when we heard the rooster utter a very strange noise: he was in the trap. So it was free the rooster, get him back in the room, reset the trap, and finally leave the chicken yard. Larry decided he’d get the shotgun and wait outside the chicken yard, just in case the murderer came early.
After a while he came back in, planning to come early Monday morning to see if we’d caught the murdering varmint in one of the traps. Since this is Sunday night, I have no conclusion to the story except to say if you’re planning to get a few chickens to lay eggs, go ahead and get a cow to milk and plant a five-acre garden and see which one drives you crazy first.
(Note: after this was written, Larry caught a big, fat possum in one of the traps on Tuesday night. Since then, the three chickens with the addition of four laying hens from Larry’s pen have been safe from predators and are laying a couple of eggs a day again. Oh, don’t think it’s over; there’s always another chapter to the interesting life of chickens.)
