Flights of Fancy

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"The center of every man's existence is a dream."

G. K. Chesterton

Flights of Fancy

Today, the 2^nd Friday in October is World Egg Day (Thank you Bundy P. for reminding me), so I want to share one of my favorite childhood stories with you.

Have you ever had a dream that didn't quite get off the ground? When I was just five years old, I had a dream. I received a nest egg from a family friend thinking my dream would take flight. But while I was still incubating the idea; before I could even hatch this scheme; my hopes were dashed to the ground. If only my parents had been home.

The truth to this story is that our neighbors took me to a farm one sunny spring day. I was so enamored of little fluff balls chicks hatching in the chicken pen that the farmer gave me an egg to hatch for myself. Of course the adults knew that my dream could never come true, but snickering behind their hands they gave me my egg. They told me that I had to keep holding it as if I were the mother hen. I had to keep it warm or it wouldn't hatch. I held on to it very carefully throughout the rest of the farm tour. I paid extra attention to it in the car on our way home. When I got home, reality set in. The neighbors left me at my house all by myself because my family was still out running an errand. I had to wait alone for them to return home.

I truly tried to hold onto that egg. I held it in one hand, then the other as I stood gazing out the window, watching for our car to pull into the drive. The longer I waited, the more worried I became. In my five-year-old mind I was just sure that my folks had been in an accident and were never coming home. As I started to panic, I forgot to concentrate on my egg. Instead of carefully holding it in one hand, then the other, I began to drop it from one hand to the hand below. Then, with one eye looking out the window and one on the egg, it slipped. Instead of dropping into my outstretched hand, the egg fell to the floor with a splat!

Thankfully, there wasn't a half-formed chick inside the egg after all. It was just yolk and white. But it was my yolk and white all over the floor. I felt like I'd killed its only chance to live. I was miserable. I began to cry for the egg, then I cried because I was alone, then I cried because I was sure I was all alone in the world forever. Life can be so dramatic at that age. By the time my parents got home from the store, I was a sodden mess.

Even if my parents had been home, this dream was doomed to failure. People had given me false hope. I was set up from the start. I am an optimist though. This one little setback didn't keep me from dreaming of raising a chicken.

When my folks determined I was finally old enough, we also had the right place to raise chickens, so they put my dream back in my hands. We moved to a place in the country when I was 12. It already had barns with a chicken house.

We spent that autumn cleaning all the old muck, sawdust and feathers out of the hen house, putting up a new chicken wire door, and bringing in clean straw for the egg boxes. Then in early spring, Dad brought home a box of day-old chicks from the feed store. We put them in a shed with an incubator light over them to keep them warm, fed them a very finely ground meal, set up an automatic water jug and before we knew it, they were big enough to move into the chicken coop.

Every spring for the next six or seven years, I played mother hen to my new box of chicks. We raised them until they were about six-months old. Then when we could tell the hens from the roosters, it was "off with their heads!" The roosters were prepared for the freezer for the next year's chicken dinners. The hens became my goldmine.

I fed, watered them and kept their house and pen clean. I found out that they loved to eat watermelon rind. I also found that a single owl flying towards their chicken wire door would scare them enough to huddle against the far wall smothering the ones on the bottom. In return for all my hard work, they laid the largest eggs I'd ever seen. I fed them oyster shells making their eggshells so thick we really had to rap them hard against the counter to crack them open. When we did, the most beautiful yolks sat straight up in the thick viscous white.

My mom advertised my eggs for me at her work and before I knew it, I was selling ten to fifteen dozen eggs a week. Even at twenty-five cents a carton, I made money hand over fist. Of course, I had to pay for the chicken supplies by myself, but I had my dream.

Yes, I was a chicken farmer. I got to get up 365 days a year at the crack of dawn (or earlier) to take care of chickens. No matter what I was doing in the evening, I got to go back out and shut the chickens back inside their house. On Christmas Day, I carried buckets of boiling water out to the chicken coop to melt the skin of ice on the watering troughs. On Easter, I had dozens of brown eggs to try to turn pastel for my younger sisters. On the first day of Junior High, I had to clean chicken crap off the bottom of my new shoes before I got on the school bus. So, it wasn't all trips to the bank.

In the Bible it says that hope deferred can shrivel the soul. My parents could have let my kindergartner dream go by the wayside. I would have never known the joy of raising an animal from a baby until it could produce an income and then eventually be buried in my "old hen graveyard." (I didn't have the heart to eat a chicken for whom I'd given a name.) I found out that dreams come with a lot of hard work and aren't free. I also found out that if I let this dream take flight, there wouldn't be eggs for breakfast!

I wil always be grateful that my parents were there for me when I began to hatch new schemes. They helped me turn my dreams and hard work into reality.

© Susan K. Barton 2007

If you liked this story, you might like to read some of my other essays and non-fiction stories which you can find by clicking on this link.