The Chicken Definitely Came First. The Eggs Were Later.

It's all my stepfather's fault. I wanted a puppy but he wouldn't let me have one. Instead I got the lone survivor of a cousin's failed 4H project - a gangly, average White Leghorn chick, who somehow had escaped an oppossum attack that left her clutchmates dead. I doubt he ever expected that chicken to live as long as she did and in fact, looking back, she did disappear rather mysteriously. Not so much as a feather left behind, she just vanished. I was heartbroken and no, we did not have fried chicken for dinner that night.

I named her Lizzie after a little girl in a Campbell's soup commercial and she turned out to be anything but average. Chickens like Popsicles, which is a handy bit of knowledge to possess when you're trying to train a chicken to walk across the top of a swing set, tightrope-style. It was summer in the 70s - we didn't have video games or cable TV and entertained ourselves by trying to train the chicken to DO something, other than simply being a chicken, I suppose. Walking across the top of the swing set was the natural progression from going down the slide, after all. My best friend Kathleen was scarred for life by this event when Lizzie realized that HER Popsicle was more readily available than the one I was holding over my head as a lure. She was short (Kathleen, I mean) and when Lizzie realized that she could jump up and actually reach it, the game was on. Kathleen dropped it halfway through her first lap around the yard and ran all the way home. From that day on Kathleen wouldn't set foot in our backyard if that chicken was out of her pen and no kid with a Popsicle was off-limits, as far as Lizzie was concerned. This posed a rather interesting dilemma for her when the ice cream man came around.


Lizzie was my faithful companion for nearly seven years. She rode around in my younger brother Andy's Radio Flyer wagon until she'd get bored or dizzy, at which point she would bail out. Somewhere in a box is a Super 8 movie of my then-toddler brother in little plaid shorts, dropping the handle of the wagon, scooping up the chicken, putting her back in the wagon and starting all over again. The process is repeated until the "putting" becomes more of a "plopping," and the distance traveled gets shorter and shorter. I have to find that movie because it deserves to be seen again - my memory of it is that it's pretty funny. Especially those plaid shorts. Lizzie would occasionally tolerate a spin around the cul de sac in the basket on the handlebars of my bike. I don't think it ever occurred to me that having a pet chicken was unusual, anymore than it occurred to her that riding around on a bicycle was. She was the Huck Finn to my Tom Sawyer, the Lassie to my Timmy, the Lucy to my Ethel. She helped my mom in the garden by expertly removing worms as she dug and planted (and so did my brother, actually. I think they might have shared a few). Lizzie earned her keep by laying eggs. Lots of perfect white eggs with lovely marigold colored yolks. The trouble was, you never could be sure where she would lay them. Lizzie sometimes laid from her favorite tree limb, which, of course, splattered all over the patio below. The term "hot enough to fry an egg" is based in fact, people. I scrubbed a few fried eggs off that patio that summer! After we had our back deck built, she moved to the window box outside the kitchen. It was very convenient, but this was a chicken with a sense of humor (or perhaps short term memory loss) and so she also set about laying them willy-nilly, in the flower beds, under the deck, in the ivy that flanked our front door. The daily egg hunts got old (or rather, discovering an old egg did) so one day I left her locked in her little coop, thinking she would deposit her egg in the perfectly suitable NEST box. Instead she paced back and forth until I felt sorry for her and set her free (a ploy that works with my present day flock, as well). She promptly hopped the fence to the neighbor's yard and deposited an egg in the flower bed.