My Little Dinosaurs

New prompt: the benefits of chicken TV.

In the spring of 2020, when it was hard to find toilet paper or reasonably priced eggs, my husband and I turned into Ma and Pa Ingalls. Or he turned into them. He learned to bake sourdough bread. (I ate the bread.) He planted a mammoth garden, twice as big as the year before. (I ate the vegetables.) He talked me into backyard chickens. (I will never eat these chickens, but I do eat their eggs.)

I was certain that chicken rearing would be his thing. He’d raised them before and felt an affinity. They have personalities, he promised. And, if we handled them as chicks, they’d be little creatures we could cuddle and pet.

I doubted this. As a girl in Maine, when my neighbors went to Florida, I was tasked with hen sitting. These chickens smelled bad. They ran from me, squawking, impossible to herd into their coop. My collie, Winnie, snatche…