If a day starts out awry, it is difficult if not impossible to get it back on the straight and narrow. Really, the best thing to do is to take a sedative or two or three and go back to bed. Few, myself included, ever do this. Instead, we suffer the consequences of the unseen events that follow the first.

This morning I looked in the chicken enclosure – I was checking to see if Ruth and Bader had enough water. They did. Then I did a visual sweep, just to make sure that they were okay. Ruth, on the roost pole, was just fine. Bader was in the right hand far corner, dead. It was déjà vu all over again, as Ginsberg died a few weeks ago.

Bader

I have a hard time handling dead animals, so Pete buried her in the compost/manure pile. I don’t know exactly where, and I don’t want to know.

Bader was the middle chicken – difficult of course to tell from her flock mates although she was larger in size than Ginsberg. She was a good, good chicken, and like the other two, would hop on my wrist when I went in the wintertime to put her in the upper roost.

Bader is survived by Ruth and by her initial flock mates over at my friend Heather’s place. I need to ask Heather how many are left.

I feel Ruth’s angst. Tonight she was at the coop gate. She wanted out because she thought that the others were out and that I’d inadvertently left her in the coop. How do you explain to a chicken that this was not the case, that her buddies had died? I did the best I could. And the best included calling Zach, our veterinarian, who said when we visited him recently that he had young chickens.

And so I called him, and he said, sure, that we could have a few. So on Sunday we will go and get two more. He said that his chickens are feral, which of course gave me reason to pause. I want chickens that are socialized. I guess that I will have to socialize these girls, but they are going to be dismayed because our enclosure is a small penthouse, not, as Zach’s place is, a vast free range pasture.

There is also a 50-50 chance that the chicken, or chickens, that we choose may turn out to be rooster or roosters. Zach might take these back for the stew pot. As if I would let this happen. I do not think, though, that after all these years, that Ruth is going to want to copulate and populate.

What you get then, if you have a rooster and a chicken, is chicklets. I wonder if chicklets are like geese and imprint upon the first moving individual that they see. If we had a big place, well yes, I would hatch geese and imprint them. I am a woman with big animal plans but lacking in the space to carry them out.

I didn’t get to write about the rest of my day. Paying tribute to the loss of a loved one takes time and effort.

Next: 244. 9/9/25: A Basis for Comparison