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A quote: “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” ~~ Marcus Aurelius
I’ll start with a story …
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Daughter Ruth brought The Girl home. Pink hair, full-sleeve tattoos and enough facial hardware to fear random lightening storms.
While her motives were suspect, we said nothing but “Welcome” and put her on the family duty schedule.
Oh, the times I bit my lip! She had no clue how to operate a stove, which end of a broom to hold, even sewing on a button was something from another planet. Gathering eggs brought screams even the cows noticed.
9-months later, her hair is auburn, her face is healing and she doesn’t burn dinner when it’s her turn.
I have hope.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Navig8r says: You are guilty of spreading disinformation. The cook was discussing a recipe for dumplings. DUMPLINGS! Dumplings are made from wheat flour. WHEAT IS A GRAIN! WE EAT GRAIN! GRAIN IS NOT AN ANIMAL PRODUCT! There is no threat to chickens or any other animal. There have been no mysterious disappearances of chickens or any other animals. Calling them mysterious disappearances is disinformation. Discussing mysterious disappearances is spreading disinformation. The management will release the data on where the other chickens went and what they did there in 75 years. Your penalty for spreading such malicious and dangerous disinformation will be severe.
Dupin says: Chicken?
What?
Where?
Why?
Outdoor smells. Pain assailed me. Memories flooded in.
Blood crusted my face. Felt—bullet creased my skull. Bled well. Arm didn’t move well. Shoulder? Thigh, too?
I should never have woken again…crossed Mully’s gang. Dumped here around midnight, wherever here was, then they shot at me from the car. Not efficient. Single bullet to the forehead would’ve ended everything. Mully was always stupid, though.
I shifted, groaned as the wounds screamed for attention…everything superficial, though. Felt my pocket with my good hand—fished cellphone out. Stupid Mully and the others would be dead within the hour.
Fletch says: Little Red eyed the feeding trough. Any time now the farmer would come to fill it with grain. Then there would be a feeding frenzy – everyone running forward, fighting for position.
But Little Red had a plan. It had been hard to come up with a plan considering she only had a brain the size of a peanut. She’d laid awake thinking, thinking, thinking.
It had come to her in a dream. She would run toward the trough as fast as she could, flapping her wings to warn everyone else away. It was the perfect plan! It would totally work.
Sheila Garrett says: I handed him paper and pen and pushed him down against the wall. A rooster jumped on a hen and got busy. I pointed, “That’s one. I want you to keep track of how often the hens get jumped on. Also how much the roosters do to show care or affection for the hens. Write it down. Compare it to your behavior. I’ll be back at suppertime.”
Julie was still drying her eyes and Steven was slamming wood together in the workshop. The college boy was lucky to be alive after telling her Dad he was willing to pay for an abortion.
Elaine remembered how scary the chicken house had seemed when her mother had first started her gathering eggs. It was so gloomy in there, and those hens looked huge to a five-year-old girl, their beaks long and sharp enough to peck your eyes out.
Now gathering eggs was the one chore she truly enjoyed. It gave her time by herself, away from her parents’ endless criticism. And the hens only pecked because they were trying to protect their eggs, not to be mean like the girls at school who were alway treating her as if she were dirty, just because of the treatments she’d received before birth.
When she’d asked her parents why they hadn’t just said no, they explained that if they hadn’t taken her to Academician Voronsky and he hadn’t forced her lungs to grow properly in an artificial uterine environment, she would’ve never drawn breath. Wasn’t it better to have a full natural span ahead of her than to live only long enough for her parents to hold her and say goodbye?
Cameron says: It’s the eyes. Bright yellow and at first glance they seem vacant. But that’s what they want you to think. They want you to believe that they are helpless birds. They watch as you enter their home to collect eggs.
And then you step out and realize that the one bird was simply there to lure you into a sense of security. The rest are there to deal with you as an invader. Then they strike.
Which is a long winded way of explaining what kind of training I went through when I was little to become a track star.
GWB says: “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
Therefore, do not kill the rooster when he wakes you. It is a privilege to be waked to the morning.
“Forget that. Tonight I have fired chicken.” He grabs the axe decisively and walks out the door as the rooster crows again.
msa says: Spouse’s layoff from an hour-each-way desk, followed by scamper for placeholder part-time. A too-brief interlude in Italy (first vacation in a decade), bewildering epiphany of breast as afterword. Dantean chemo and the knife ensue.
Demanding Memory summons that fragment of a larger cloud of witnesses, a quarter of our Bible Study, who had gone before us and chose to hold their faces up to Light over darkness of mortal coil. Seven weeks of radiation, and each morning afterwards a walk under mirifically bright skies in the gentle Spring of that year. That “inadequate” part-time? This also was a gift unforeseen–way had been cleared for my love to care for me.
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