Chicken Fever

My parents are citrus farmers in Florida, and last July (soon after I told my mom that I got two chicks) she called me up to say that she got two chicks from a worker. Queenie and Brownie are wild and flighty with long legs, skinny body and brown feathers. Every time she'd let them out to roam in the orange grove, they would fly up into the trees and never come back. My mom wasn't satisfied with just two chickens, and once they started laying eggs, she borrowed a rooster to fertilize the eggs. Eventually 11 chicks hatched out of 14 eggs.

Still, she was envious of my fat and domestic chickens so last week, she got 3 Rhode Island Reds and 3 Ameraucanas. That's a lot of chickens.