The Minnesota Farm Woman

Last week, I was given the gift of three one-week-old Black Australorp baby chicks. They are supposed to be girls, but we all know that around here, things don’t always work out the way they were supposed to.  The babies had been snug in their little cage under a heat lamp for nearly a week, and were surprisingly tame when I reached in to feed them, give them water, and of course, pet them, because baby chicks are just so darn cute!  I have been keeping the babies on my breezeway, because it is the next warmest thing to the living room, and for some reason, HE frowns upon keeping barnyard creatures in the house.  The breezeway is kind of a catch-all/storage/laundry room/kick your boots off type of room, and for all the aforementioned reasons, is always a mess. There are shoes and boots and coats and hats and potatoes and onions and a vacuum cleaner, and now…..a large cage on a card table and a bag of chick food.  Please don’t laugh, this really is my life. Anyhow, I was in the midst of mopping floors and doing laundry and on my 27th time passing that cage I noticed that it held only one chick. I stopped in my tracks and immediately picked up Barney the Chihuahua, who had started sniffing around, and locked him in the kitchen. Slowly and carefully, I inched around, looking inside boots and boxes, carefully sorting through the laundry pile, finding no baby chicks. Fearing they had hidden behind the washing machine, I carefully picked up a sack of potatoes to move out of the way when I found one, who had managed to hide herself among the spuds. As soon as I picked her up and she started cheeping, the other escapee started making noise from across the room and it was easy to find her. Whew. Another disaster diverted. I couldn’t figure out how they had slipped out, but since the cage was wrapped in towels, I tucked the towels around it more carefully, securing them with clothespins and continued going about my business. When you are a Farm Woman, having a day off from your job does not mean you have a day off from work.  When I passed that cage for the 40th time, I noticed once again that the two babies had escaped.  What the heck?  On my hands  again, I began to search, and found them both under a bench, huddled next to the heat register.  I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting out pieces of cardboard to line the cage, hopefully keeping them from escaping.  That afternoon, I had an escapee from the big coop hiding in the shed, making me crawl around in the still foot-deep snow trying to get her out.  I think that all chickens great and small must have a case of spring fever and are feeling the need to escape somewhere or anywhere.   Who can blame them?  I feel exactly the same way.  Last year at this time was warm and I was considering an early planting of lettuce, beets and radishes, and the chickens were free-ranging in the yard.  This year, there is more than a foot of snow still covering the garden, and the somewhat gloomy forecast is for more snow this week. Minnesota springs cannot be trusted, and neither can chickens.