© Another Day in the Country
Remember what it was like before all the political conventions when we were watching the Olympics night after night? I tried to figure out why they were showing the same sports over and over, swimming for instance — through all the preliminaries — when I knew there were other things going on?
While I sat watching, veering into boredom, I decided to multi-task and do something constructive with this time sitting in front of a television. So, I got out my paints and started making chicken cards.
Just in case you don’t know about Chicken Cards, I’ll tell you that it started several years ago after I’d gotten my first batch of chickens. My mother would collect feathers that they shed — the especially pretty ones — and give them to me. I’m not sure what I was supposed to do with those feathers but I’d accept them from Mom. After all, she was a collector of things like I am: pebbles, seeds, pieces of driftwood, feathers.
Then one day I got this bright idea! I’d make Mom some Chicken Cards that she could use to write to her friends and I’d attach the feathers to the chickens. I started painting, since watercolor is my thing, and before you know it had a set of cards to present to her.
“Oh, make me some more,” she said a few days later. “I’ve used them all up!”
So, I started making Chicken Cards in earnest and took them to our Barbershop Gallery to sell — we’ve even got them on our website.
Since each card is an original watercolor painting, they are time consuming, so I look for odd moments when I can do two things at once and paint cards.
As I painted, during the Olympics, I got bored with chickens on nest and chickens eating and chickens cackling and started drawing chickens doing what I was seeing on the television screen.
“Hmmm,” I said to myself, “I wonder what the categories would be if there was Olympics for chickens?”
For sure we’d have a competition in egg production with extra points for lovely colored eggs. Perhaps hatching could be a way for chickens to compete — could they set a record and do it in less than 21 days?
The balance beam would be something chickens could do easily, but what about laying an egg on a balance beam? And what about chicken floor exercises, toes pointed — with or without music?
For the roosters there could be crowing (cackling for hens), food finding, control of the flock, strutting, and kickboxing.
Black Bart would be a natural at Olympic competition, being the underdog when he was young and finally growing into a handsome cock, he knows how to strut his stuff. Reginald, the young upstart in the Alpha Hen House, isn’t really ready for competition. He reminds me of the mayor from London, (remember him at the closing Olympic exercises?) with his coat unbuttoned and this bewildered look on his face as if he’s saying, “How exactly did I get myself into this?”
It’s another day in the country, and I’ve obviously got too much time on my hands.