Chicken Snatching

"Stop the car!" I yelled to Bob. "I see a chicken loose by the street. I bet she belongs to the neighbor across the alley. She looks like the photo the teen-agers showed me last week when they rang our door asking if we had lost a chicken,"

Bob hesitated but kept on driving. "If the chicken is still there we will stop on our way back from the store."

On our way back the lone chicken was no where in sight and we continued on our way home.

A week later my daughter and granddaughter were in my car driving down the same street. There was the chicken in the same spot near the curb! This time I was determined to rescue that loose hen that was picking industriously along the sidewalk near a garbage can, dangerously close to frequent traffic!

I stopped the car. My daughter and granddaughter declined to accompany me and cringed in the car, certain that that chicken belonged to that house. As I pursued the chicken, who managed to stay just inches out of reach, I looked up at the house and thought, "Maybe this chicken belongs to this house. It seems like a chicken house somehow."

I stopped the chase and went back to the car. I saw a gentleman in his yard a short distance away. I drove up to him, rolled down the window and asked him about the chicken.

"You don't want to tamper with Miss Chicky", he said solemnly. "She belongs to the lady in that house. We all like her 'cause she eats all the bugs around our houses."

Who would have thought? A chicken who roams the yard, avoiding the street with all the passing traffic, eats the pesky bugs and is quite contented with her lot! Somehow she has managed to avoid all the predators that roam the nearby woods, while a few blocks away other chicken owners have lost their entire penned flocks to a wily, hungry, mother fox.

Meanwhile, back in the car my family were in hysterics. I was called a "chicken snatcher", a "chicken thief" and other unpleasant names. My daughter delighted in sharing the story with all my friends in town.

"What if my mother had caught that chicken and brought her to the man she thought it belonged to? The man would have said, "It's not my chicken." "Then what? My mother would be a chicken snatcher!"

Summer is a time for visits from old friends and family. We share memories and stories, and during the visit new stories are created to share again and again with friends and family new and old. One that will remain into future generations, if my daughter has her way, will undoubtedly be My Mother, the Chicken Rustler.