A Memory of Chickens

a very short essay

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

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This morning, as I made myself scrambled eggs, I glanced out the kitchen window and saw that our neighbor’s backyard was filled with a riot of white chicken feathers.

“Oh, no!” I thought. “Our neighbor’s chickens have been attacked!”

But then I remembered that our neighbors don’t have chickens and that it was just the last remnants of snow that I’d mistaken for feathers.

I laughed at myself and then I remembered that, back in the 1980s, my high school girlfriend’s family owned three cows and maybe ten chickens on their very small ranch.

I remember that one of those cows was named Loretta, after Ms. Lynn herself, but I don’t remember the names of the chickens. I’d eaten any number of food items made from their eggs. The yolks were not uniform in color. That was startling at first but then seemed delightfully eccentric. I’d also been surprised to learn that white chickens lay white eggs and brown chickens lay brown eggs. That’s about simple genetics, of course, but it still felt like a fantastic fiction from a Roald Dahl novel.

Charlie and the Big Friendly Poultry, anybody?

Then, early one morning during my junior year, my girlfriend and I walked out to their coop and saw a riot of white feathers strewn across the dirt and grass. It wasn’t snow. It was death.

Those feathers were stained with blood. An unknown animal had broken through the coop’s defenses and slaughtered the chickens.

My girlfriend was angry and distraught. But she was also an industrious worker who had to clean up the mess. She picked up a shovel, handed me another, and we dug a mass chicken grave.

And, soon enough, she and her family bought new chickens. On a ranch, mourning has a short shelf life.

My girlfriend and I dated throughout high school. Then I went to college but she didn’t. Then she moved to Seattle and I dropped out of college and followed her to the big city. She and I were never meant to last. She was a conservative Christian who wanted to marry a conservative Christian. I didn’t yet know what I wanted.

Then, while working the graveyard shift at a Seattle sandwich shop, I was robbed at gunpoint. After I told my story to the police officers, I walked home, packed up my car with everything that I owned, and drove back over the Cascade Mountains to my reservation.

Our breakup was never officially declared. Aside from a few phone calls and one lunch, my girlfriend and I just faded from each other’s lives.

Many years later, I walked off the plane in SeaTac Airport to see her waiting for somebody who’d been on the flight with me. She was holding a baby. We saw each other and paused for just a moment. Then she looked away. I looked away. And we left each other’s lives again.

When it comes to romantic relationships, we often tell our stories about the people who’ve hurt us most but we rarely tell the stories about the people whom we’ve hurt most.

That’s how it goes. We’re the unreliable narrators of our own lives.

So what does it mean when I tell you that sunflowers grew from the mass grave that my girlfriend and I dug together?

And what does it mean when I tell you that those sunflowers’ stems and petals were white instead of green and yellow?

Well, it probably means that I’m telling you a poetic lie.

Or maybe it’s the truth.