Have you ever had a dream that didn’t quite get off the ground? When I was five years old, I had a dream. I received a nest egg from a family friend and I thought my dream would take flight. But while I was still incubating the idea, and 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. There were chicks hatching in the chicken pen and I was so enamored of these little fluff balls 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. My family was still out running an errand and the friends left me at my house all by myself to wait for Mom and Dad to return home.
I truly tried to hold onto that egg. I held it in one hand and 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 and then the other, I began to drop it from one hand to the hand below. Then, with one eye out the window and one on the egg, it slipped and instead of dropping into my outstretched hand, it 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 had been my yolk and white and it was 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 and then I cried because I was alone, then I cried because I was sure I was alone in the world. 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, and this one little failure didn’t keep me from dreaming of raising a chicken.
When my folks determined I was finally old enough and we had the right place to raise chickens, they put my dream back in my hands. We moved to a place in the country when I was 12. It already had barns and a chicken house.
We spent that autumn cleaning all the old muck, sawdust and feathers out of the hen house, put up a new chicken wire door, and brought in clean straw for the egg boxes. Then in early spring, Dad brought home a box of day-old chicks from the feed and seed store. We put them in a shed with an incubator light over them to keep them warm. We fed them a very finely ground meal and set up an automatic water jug. 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 plucked and frozen for the next year’s chicken dinners. The hens became my goldmine.
I fed and 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. The shells were so thick you really had to rap them hard against the counter to crack them open and when you 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 you 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 feed and the oyster shell 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 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 thaw out the skin of ice on the watering troughs. On Easter, I had dozens of brown eggs to try to make pastel for my younger sisters. And 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 “chicken 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!
Be there your kids when they begin to hatch new schemes. Help them turn their dreams and hard work into reality. Hopefully their dream isn’t to be a chicken farmer like mine was
.© 2000-3 Sue Bartonfor
