"Do you have chickens" the voice came from the old man living across the street from us. We had been here 2 months now, and had yet to meet the folks who lived in that house. We had been hesitant to approach them and introduce ourselves. I had seen the woman a few times, she would sit in her car, and honk relentlessly until her husband came out to help her carry bags into the house. She followed with the aid of 2 walking sticks. She had long hair, mostly gray with reddish brown tips. Her husband would sometimes pass me on the way from the post office but I would just get a nod from him. They probably talked about us, and I imagined them sitting by the fire and saying things like, "who are those men living in that house, and where are their wives and kids." "All I see are those strange looking dogs with cruchies on their heads."
"Yes!" I replied, "We do". At the time we only had 2 chickens, Elizabeth the Araucana, named after Elizabeth Hasselbeck from The View, because she was very vocal and opinionated when we first got her. And the other chicken we name Oprah, because well, she was plump, black and compassionate. We had come home from running errands, only to find Oprah missing. With the help of John our neighbor from the new development of mc mansions behind us we searched the area in hopes of finding her. At first we thought the fox got her. he had been seen walking nonchalantly through our property recently, but there were no signs of a kill. Assuming those signs would have been splatters of blood on nearby bushes, that after swabbing with my CSI kit I bought from HSN would reveal poultry DNA. There wasn’t a feather in sight! Maybe she had been grabbed by a hawk, evidence of them was confirmed a few days earlier when I saw two circling around our yard, much like a discovery episode of Earth, waiting for a chance to dive down and swoop up our beloved birds.
"Is one of them black?” the old man asked, to which I replied with much hope in my voice, "Yes!" “Have you seen her, we seem to be missing her." He continued by telling us that she had crossed the road (Kent, don’t go there!) into his property and was walking along the creek, he had picked her up and threw her over to our side only to spot her a few hours later, back along the creek on his side. Both David and I, John at this point had given up and was back on his porch nursing a beer, telling his wife Kelly of brave attempts at trying to locate missing Oprah, traversed both sides of the creek trying to spot our beloved Oprah.
Properties here in Erwinna tend to just blend into each other. There are no fences our real visible separation between yards. Even though the old man gave us permission to walk on his land, we weren’t quite sure where it ended. Being new to the neighborhood we weren’t sure what the proper etiquette was. Now of course we know better, just as we had seen the old man come on our property a few weeks earlier and watch him cut daffodils, it became apparent that there were no borders and with good enough reason it was acceptable to "trespass". I noticed David was ahead of me and talking to another man, who also had seen Oprah, Cap who lives behind the old couple, thought he was dreaming and got his wife to confirm that yes indeed that was a black chicken walking across their yard. A few moments later I spotted her, pecking away at the ground not a care in the world on the towpath which was separated by a canal with Cap's property on one end. We could not figure out how she got over there, short of her flying to the other side. Yet chickens don't fly, or do they? A biker happened to pass by her, stopped and asked,” is this your chicken?" “Is she friendly?" He swooped her up under his arm, and brought her over to us. We spent the next 20 minutes talking to Cap and his wife about the neighborhood, who lives where, this house used to be the whore house, that house used to be a general store, until Oprah became restless in my arms. Once back in our yard, she resumed to pecking at the ground, no harm done. A few weeks later she disappeared again, unfortunately we never found her again.
So, the couples across the street are named, Pus and Millie, Millie grew up in the house we live in. She sometimes gets in her car, drives across the street to our house to give us apples, strawberries and blueberries. She loves coming in the house to see it and talk about what used to be here. She talks about her husband, "Daddy said.......now you don't mind that I call him that do you?” We in turn, give them eggs, or whatever we have plenty of in the garden.
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