The (Not So) Glamorous Life of a Farm Girl

If you give your wife a chicken, she’ll ask you for some goats, and you’ll wind up with an ass that won’t go inside when she’s froze…

Polly, our sweet-but-stubborn donkey, firmly planted her hooves into the ground and wouldn’t budge. Her body was covered in nearly two inches of ice, and I could not get her into the barn. I had to leave her out in the nasty wind until Ray got home from work. After telling my mom all about my donkey woes, she asked when I was going to start writing about life on the “farm.” After all, “Farmgirl” is in the title of my blog. I explained I just didn’t have anything fun or interesting about life on the farm to write about currently. Famous last words. The next day proved to be quite an adventure.

Baby, It’s Beyond Cold Outside

Friday was cold. Beyond cold. Bundled in full winter gear, I headed outside to do chores, the thermometer reading a blustery 4 degrees. Everything was frozen. The water spicket was froze shut. Snow drifts were solid and every surface was covered in a thin sheet of ice. It was like Elsa had moved in next door and was having a bad day. A frozen spicket meant dragging nasty farm buckets into the house and filling them in the bathtub. Oh joy. Determined to not make any more trips than necessary, I filled two buckets to the brim and gingerly carried them through the house. This is not an easy feat for someone who has previously broken their clavicle during an intense game of kiddie pool kickball, but that’s another story. I managed to make it across the yard to the barn unscathed…and dry. However, there were a couple of drifts not as solid as they appeared that plunged me thigh deep into frozen snow. After letting the barn crew out for some sunshine and fresh water, I moved onto the chickens.

The Tails of Two Chickens

Brutal winds, and a turkey that insisted on roosting on top of the coop, had destroyed it, so we have had to lock the chickens in the shed at night. Ray is thoroughly enjoying sharing his workshop with a bunch of large birds that roost on the garage door track and drop large amounts of poop on anything below them all night long. Feel free to insert some sarcasm into that last sentence. I decided to chase them out of the garage for a little bit and feed them outside. After I finished, I walked past the front of the shed and noticed a rooster and a hen nesting in my flower shelf.

My shelf was so cute this summer, filled with clay pots of pretty flowers, until the hens decided the shelves also make great nesting boxes. They kicked my pots out and moved in. I tried fighting them for it, but in the end they won. As I walked past them sitting in THEIR shelf, I wondered why they hadn’t stopped to eat and how they had made themselves so comfortable that quickly. Still mulling that over in my head, I walked over and “shooed” them out. However, they didn’t shoo. Actually, the worst part is, they TRIED to shoo. They were stuck. Frozen to the shelves. My fears were confirmed as I examined the situation. The chickens hadn’t been in the shed. They had snuck out and roosted in their favorite spot…my shelf. The warmth from their bodies had melted the snow and ice, and the frigid temps had refroze it around their tails and feathers. I felt sick.

Operation: Chicken Thaw

I frantically dug my phone out of my pocket to call “the hubs”, as I often lovingly refer to him, only to discover it wouldn’t hold a charge in the extreme cold. Panicked, I ran back in the house, plugged in the phone and called him. Thankfully, he had just purchased a portable propane heater. He walked me through the steps of setting it up and starting it. I hauled it outside, turned on the gas, and said a prayer that it wouldn’t blow up as I turned the knob on the heater. If you can’t tell, I tend to lean towards the dramatic side of things. It started right up with no explosion following, and I pointed it UNDER the shelf the hen was sitting on. I knew if I pointed it directly at her, it would have cooked her, and we weren’t looking to have fried chicken for dinner. I moved on to water some of the other critters. Thankfully, when I came back she was free. I picked her up and put her in the shop, then moved the heater to thaw the rooster.

The closer I looked at the poor, frozen rooster, the more I realized how stuck he really was. He didn’t just have a few frozen feathers pinning him down. He was embedded in ice, from his feet all the way up to his underside. Holding the heater under the shelf with one hand, and gently pulled feathers out of the ice with the other, I stood there in the freezing cold for nearly twenty minutes. As I moved the heater around and picking at feathers, the rooster made a target out of my hand, pecking me every chance he got. Finally free, I carried him to the shop. He immediately began running around, although somewhat gingerly. I breathed a prayer of thankful relief and headed for the house, waddling across the ice and frozen to my core.

Before You Give Your Wife a Chicken

2 o’clock P.M. I thought maybe my frozen eyeballs were deceiving me as I read the clock. My day was pretty much gone. Morning chores had lasted all day. I still had to go back out and get other animals back into the barn and feed hay. Ignoring the boiled-over oatmeal covering the stove from breakfast, I put the kettle on for some tea. As I sipped on my tea I pondered my day. If you are longing for glamorous, country life surrounded by cute farm animals, just remember this little story. And before you give your wife a chicken, make sure she understands she, too may have to fight it for her cute flower shelf…and lose.