The best feature of fresh eggs is eating them (and obviously coloring them when our lord and savior resurrects himself), but watching them come into existence is just as gratifying, especially when the hens are personal acquaintances. When I was younger, my parents thought it would be fun to adopt six chickens of diverse breeds and house them in our backyard, so the egg-laying process is one I’ve been able to watch on copious occasions for the short time we pretended to be farmers.
My winged friends included three black, two speckled and one white hen, all of different temperaments and ages. I could only pick up the white one and speckled ones, as the black chickens were complete pricks. After school — this was middle school at the time — I’d come home, go into the coop and watch them interact with my Labrador salivating on the other side of the chicken-wire (no pun intended) fence. A lot of bruck-bruck-brucking and flappety-flapping made up their lives, unable to fly and caged even if they could.
On a rare day, one of my chickens would decide that instead of coming down from her perch to play, she would stay isolated while a tasty treat percolated inside of her uterus. Sounds appetizing, yeah? I would watch whatever chicken of the day was in this mode while she cooed softly, concentrating on her objective of dislodging the shelly oval from her crotch. As the cooing became louder and more bothered, the egg would begin to crown, and gradually it made its way out into the nest to be taken up by me and cleaned, cracked and poured out into cookie batter.
Chickens, however, serve other functions besides making edible excretions. When the weather was warm enough to open the windows, the early-morning crows became a sufficient alarm system, but at the same time annoying, since there was no “sleep” mode to turn the damn things off. In vain attempts at bargaining with them to please shut the hell up, the stubborn hens would just keep brucking until it was time for them to commence their daily errands, such as worm-gathering, pecking at things and filing tax reports.
But one fateful morning in my pseudo-bucolic childhood, I visited my feathered friends before cheerleading practice without changing my sneakers afterward. An innocent mistake — perhaps I dragged in a little dirt to the gymnasium, but it’s not as if this could do any harm, right? Wrong. When my teammates lifted me up into a half elevator, they were unpleasantly surprised to find brown residue on their hands when I jumped off. Talk about an awkward situation.
My current life in Kenmore Square disqualifies me for chicken ownership, to say the least, but sometimes I still like to see chickens at farms and fairs around the Commonwealth. When my parents gave up our chickens 10 years ago, a friendly woman took them in on her farm and promised that I could visit them whenever I wanted, but when I did all that was left were some empty eggshells and a coop with its door ajar.
Sydney Shea is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences and can be reached at slshea@bu.edu
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