How a pandemic pet helped me appreciate the gift of time
Challenges come with parenting, but luring a chicken into a traveling cage was a new one for me. With some trepidation, I regarded Basil, a feisty red rooster, and the small metal cage I had to convince him to enter. Luckily, all it took was that old standby, bribery with a favorite snack. My 11-year-old daughter held out a tempting handful of raspberries, and Basil strutted right in. Quickly realizing he’d been tricked, the rooster began squawking, as did the rest of the small flock, still in their coop. My daughter and I were a bit emotional ourselves as we separated the chickens. Forget crossing the road. We were about to transport Basil on a five-hour journey, across state lines, all in an effort to save his life.
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Some people ended up with new pets during Covid-19 quarantine. New cats, new dogs. My family ended up with pandemic chickens. We had planned on getting them later in the spring anyway; my daughter had been researching backyard chickens and making plans for a coop since Christmas. When the school cancellation announcement came, and it looked like we’d be home for a while -- why not?
We picked up the day-old chicks from our local farm store, where they had just arrived in the mail. Amid a chorus of peeping and cheeping, my daughter picked out three fluffy yellow-and-tan babies. After guaranteeing (well, 90%) that the chicks were hens, the store worker stuffed them unceremoniously into a cardboard box for transport, and we brought them home to a storage tub with a warming light in our garage.
I worried about the fragility of these tiny creatures. What if we woke up in the morning and found one not moving? During that first week, I got up extra early, just to make sure before my daughter woke up that they were all still breathing. Before looking into the bin I’d say a silent prayer, and each time, miraculously, three downy faces peeked up at me.
Chickens grow quickly, and we marveled at their rapid development. Baby fluff was quickly replaced by feathers, and the plastic home that had seemed so vast appeared smaller as they grew.
During lockdown that spring, when every day seemed the same, the chickens provided a welcome distraction from online school, canceled playdates, and the celebrations that would never take place My daughter’s birthday party: canceled. Her fifth grade overnight trip: scrapped. The ceremony that would mark the end of elementary school was replaced with a Zoom meeting. Each day I checked the COVID-19 dashboard online, and numbers continued to climb. I felt gripped by anxiety as good news was hard to find. It was difficult to remain cheerful when life felt so gloomy. I heard about a few families who were making the most of lockdown by baking homemade bread, playing board games, and having cozy bonfires in their backyards. That wasn’t us. “I’d like to just go into hibernation for about six months,” I remember remarking to a friend. “Kind of like a medically induced coma…wake me up when vaccines are here.”
But with three growing chickens to care for, there was always a distraction. As spring turned to summer, it was time to move the chicks to an outside coop. They loved their tiny wooden cottage and acclimated quickly. I couldn’t help noticing that the one we’d named Basil appeared to be different from the other two. Basil was the biggest, and seemed to be developing a strut. Then one morning the crowing started. There was no denying it: we had a rooster on our hands.
“Maybe we can just keep him,” suggested my daughter. “No, absolutely not,” my husband cut in, worried about what the neighbors might think. As much as I hated to admit it, I knew he was right. Not because I cared about the neighbors’ opinions; the coop was simply too small for a rooster. This guy needed more room, and a flock with more hens. It wouldn’t be fair to the other two to leave him here.
But where could we take him? After brainstorming, my daughter and I decided on the Biltmore Estate, a nineteenth century castle located a few miles from our home. What chicken wouldn’t want to live on the grounds of a lavish Gilded Age residence? The outdoor areas of the estate had recently reopened, so we visited that very day. At the petting zoo area, where happy chickens were clucking around, we approached the attendant. Would they be interested in a well-behaved rooster? Kindly, the attendant explained that the estate has a “closed flock,” and doesn’t accept chickens from outside of its breeding program. A castle just wasn’t in the cards for Basil.
Closed flock was a term we would hear frequently over the next few days. From the local nature center, from a large nearby family farm. “Maybe you should just put him on Craigslist,” a neighbor suggested. Craigslist? I shuddered. Maybe he would find a good home...but more likely he’d end up on someone’s dinner table, or a backyard cock fighting ring. I couldn’t let that happen.
The quest to find Basil a home became a temporary obsession. But after a week of unsuccessful searching, when I spoke with a farmer who suggested taking him for a long walk in the woods and leaving him there, I knew it was time to turn elsewhere, to seek help from the person I’ve always relied on in times of trouble.
It was time to call my mother.
My mother already had several hens of her own. “Mom, do you want a rooster?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she answered. But when the whole desperate story poured out, she relented. “He can come here on one condition: If he gets aggressive, I’m giving him away to anyone who will take him.”
And just like that, it was settled. That’s how I found myself facing a five-hour drive to West Virginia with a rooster. “Do we really have to take him?” my daughter asked, as we listened to Basil’s indignant squawks from the traveling cage.
“Yes,” I answered reluctantly. “Let’s go.”
Basil kept up the noises as we began the first leg of our trip. “What kind of music do you think he’d like?” I asked.
“Maybe...Taylor Swift?” my daughter suggested.
Alas, songs about boyfriends made him squawk even louder. After flipping through Pandora stations, we discovered that James Taylor had a soothing effect. And so, with Carolina In My Mind as our theme song, we drove north through Appalachia. It wasn’t long before we crossed the Tennessee border. Soon we were in Virginia, winding through mountains, and then Kentucky. I hadn’t heard a peep from Basil in hours, but a quick peek into the hatchback at a rest stop assured me that he was still with us.
Basil seemed to be in shock when we eventually stopped the car in West Virginia. Had the trip been too much? We took him out of the cage and nudged him into his new coop. He looked around, strutted a bit, and then began introducing himself to the hens. I breathed a giant sigh of relief.
We spent a blissfully uneventful summer evening with my parents, and I pretended everything was “normal.” For a brief time I forgot about the pandemic, giving in to that nostalgic feeling that always finds me at my parents’ house, that feeling of almost being a child again.
Too soon the next morning came, and it was time to go. After giving Basil a few final raspberries, we said our goodbyes and began the winding drive back home, James Taylor still crooning on Pandora.
“James Taylor’s songs are kind of sad,” my daughter said. ”Let’s listen to something else.” I changed the station to the Hamilton soundtrack and glanced back at my daughter in the rearview mirror. She was at that in-between place, teetering between a girl and a young woman. And as the Schuyler sisters sang, “Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now…” I thought about my own luck right now. How lucky I was to be present as my daughter makes her way into her teenage years. How lucky to be nearly 40 and still have parents in good health; parents who have always been willing to lend support, even by adopting a silly rooster.
Just to be alive and well in the midst of a pandemic was a stroke of good luck. With regret, I remembered my earlier wish for a months-long escape from reality and how callous that was. As hard as some days felt, I didn’t want to miss a moment.
“You know,” my daughter said, “I think Basil’s a pretty lucky rooster.”
“Yeah,” I said softly, “I think we’re pretty lucky too.”