If Wishes Were Horses... or Ferrets.

It was about this same time that my awareness of horses turned into a longing. I can recall looking at my mom's Saddlebred horse magazines and turning down the pages that held my favorites. They were magnificent creatures, polished and pampered and almost mythical with flexed necks and flowing tails. I yearned for a horse but since I wasn't even allowed a dog or cat, this seemed like an unattainable dream. My mother, who also had the horse bug, gave me Breyer collectible horse statues for Christmases and birthdays. They were among my most treasured possessions (many of which I still have), and long hours were spent in my horsey world of cardboard barns and pencil-paddocks. I can recall carrying them out under the crab apple tree in the warmer months, and munching clover as I played with them. All of my horses had names, of course, and I had a favorite that was a Clydesdale with a requisite blaze and feathery white-stockinged legs. He came in a set with a gorgeous mare and they had matching green stable blankets. I had a recurring dream of the horse statues flying around my room at night and occasionally I would fly out the window on the back of that Clydesdale colt. The dreams were so vivid that I would wake and look out the bedroom window into my backyard, hoping to see him out there. I still have horse dreams every now and then, although not quite as vivid. I remember my Aunt Melon taking me to a place that gave pony rides, where I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, if only in twenty minute increments. I also practiced my riding skills on the back of our barrel-type barbecue grill. It was painted black and stood on long metal legs. I would tie a rope on one end, jump on and go! The Lone Ranger and another horse show called Fury were popular at the time. I watched faithfully and reenacted some of those adventures in my backyard, on my Fury barbecue grill, with a little white chicken as my sidekick.

Second in succession to Chicken Lizzie was a beautiful Barred Rock hen that I named Georgia (after the "Chicken George" character in Roots). She gave us lovely brown eggs, which seemed like a fair trade off for being allowed to free range in our unfenced yard during the day. I should add that, as with the previous house where Lizzie lived, this was in a neighborhood, with neighbors close by and a city ordinance which permitted no more than three laying hens, providing the neighbors didn't object. We did not live in the country, nor did we have anything larger than your average subdivision lot. In fact, this yard was about a fourth the size of our old one! Still, Georgia was pretty good about staying inside the boundaries and a favorite spot was in the cool green ivy near the front door. She often sat there on hot afternoons, unnoticed beneath the yew bushes. That is until the day our unsuspecting insurance guy/family friend stopped by and startled a napping Georgia, who jumped out of the ivy and ran after him. He headed for the safety of his car where he sat, honking, until my mom came out to retrieve the chicken. He swore that she chased him, but I happen to think she was just following him, hoping he might have a Popsicle.

I later added another hen for companionship for Georgia (Lizzie 2), but I wanted something more exotic than chickens. I bought a ferret in the early 1980s, before anybody really knew much about their care. I got her from the pet department at Famous Barr, of all things (which became Macy's many, many years later). I paid for her myself with money from my job selling men's shoes (a whole other story), brought her home and promptly scared the bejeebus out of my mother. She had no idea what this masked, slinky-like creature was and although she feigned disapproval, Jigs was so cute and comical that it didn't last long. My stepfather, on the other hand, would not have gone along with it for one second, so we kept her under wraps for a long time in a cage in my room, only letting her out when he wasn't home. Those of you who know a ferret may find it hard to believe due to their unique fragrance, but the arrangement worked without incident for a while. Until she went exploring. I had let her out when I got home from school and she was doing her usual happy dance all over the kitchen. If you have ever seen a ferret do this, you understand the hilarity of it. If you haven't, there is no way I can accurately describe it other than to say it is pure, unbridled glee. Picture a roll of storebought cookie dough, bent upward in the middle so as to resemble an inchworm and then imagine what that looks like hopping sideways, backwards and forwards on tippy toes. A happy ferret is a very amusing thing. The only trouble is that a happy ferret is also a very inquisitive creature that can fit into unbelievably small places. Like behind a dishwasher, say, 30 minutes before the non-animal-loving father figure is due home. This incident, I believe, is what set into motion my handiness with do-it-yourself projects. We HAD to extricate her from behind the dishwasher, or else. How we managed to do that between fits of laughter and sheer panic is still beyond me, but we did. She remained our secret until she got sick.
Labels: Lizzie
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1/22/08

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.