Hen-ce forth and never more

Sunday morning, en route to a bran muffin, I heard clucking outside the kitchen window and was shocked to see a reddish brown chicken strutting around the fenced back yard.

We do not live in the country. We’re surrounded by houses, except for a vacant lot behind us where a tree removal service dumps wood to cure and later sell for firewood.

Our cat was hugging the back door, desperate to get in and afraid of this beast that outweighed and could outpeck him.

I thought of that ancient Chinese proverb: “You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” In our case, we couldn’t prevent a chicken from strutting through the open gate to our back yard—or so I assumed, because our fence is five feet tall. I couldn’t imagine this plump lump flying any higher than a foot.

I put some wild bird seed in a cup, make sure it had water, and realized that other than visiting some nearby urban farms, there wasn’t much I could do until Monday. Urban Farm #1 had a burro and goats, but no chickens. Urban Farm #2 boasted a horse, goats and chickens, but not reddish brown ones.

On Monday I entered an ad in Craigslist, and immediately got scam Emails inviting me to amazing business opportunities (I forgot to disable the Email reply feature). I sent another ad with photo to our local newspaper, but it wouldn’t run until Tuesday. Then I called the Humane Society with a “found animal” report. After causing the officer to laugh hysterically, I got the report filed.

In the meantime, Henny Penny (as I was now calling the chicken) was wearing trails into our back yard as it paced back and forth. And our cat was the one jumping the fence as soon as we let it out—to get as far away as possible from this intruder on his territory.

On Tuesday morning, as I hung up laundry, Henny Penny kept coming near me. Finally (as an experienced petter of cats) I leaned over and stroked its back. Immediately it squatted as though wanting more. I realized this had to be a pet—but whose?

My husband took a call from a man whose friend had told him about the ad. He asked if he could have the hen, since he lost four chickens to a dog attack. When he arrived, we realized he lived just around the corner, beyond the tangle of blackberry bushes and underbrush. This hen had survived the massacre of its family and managed to get over the fence to our yard.

Lured by chicken mash, Henny Penny (real name “Kibbles,” because it likes dog food) was grabbed and taken home.

Well, the sky didn’t fall while Henny Penny paced our back yard, and I’m glad the story had a happy ending. I never thought I’d foster-care a chicken, but I was reminded of the observation of Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal.” It makes me think of Eden and the perfect relationship and sweet companionship that Adam and Eve had with all of God’s creation.

Will there be animals in Heaven? As scripture speaks of the new heavens and the new earth, I ask why not? If they were in His original, perfect plan, why not again? By the way, Henny Penny didn’t leave an egg—or at least I didn’t find one in places where it nested. But who knows, next spring, when I’m cleaning out winter yard debris….

Defense mode

One piece of enduring advice from ancient King Solomon is to go on fox-watch. I don’t mean watching Fox News, nor the whole fox-and-hound thing like British monarchs. Instead, we’re warned, “Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin the vineyard, our vineyards that are in bloom” (Song of Solomon 2:15).

For a long time, I thought that verse a bit strange. Then I learned it comes from the realities of farming grapes. In spring, fox and jackals sneak into the vineyards to burrow under the roots of the grapes, undermining the plant root system.

The context is Solomon’s love poem for this little maiden who has the king loopy-in-love with her. The common interpretation is this: don’t let anything undermine your marriage. Like, is the foot of the bed a magnet for his dirty laundry? Trap the complaint fox! Does she have enough shoes to open a store? Trap the gripe fox!

May I be so bold as to offer an alternative to the fox analogy? Drum roll: Bait the ants.

Unwelcomed, a gazillion sugar ants have moved in to taunt us. At first there were just a few, like the 12-man search party Moses sent to check out Canaan. Surely, like the Israelite spies, our ants saw giants (people) roaming around the kitchen. But this was a land of milk and honey. Or at least honey. Dried fruits in bags of trail mix. Friskies left in the cat’s dish. And breakfast cereal, which, even though supposedly oat-healthy, in small print admits to sugar in the manufacturing process. Cheers.

As soon as a few hundred more invaded, I battened down the hatches. Anything with a remote hint of sugar went in a canning jar. Plastic pour bins containing cereal got an extra seal with plastic wrap.

The kitchen started looking like a mine field with those little black disk ant baits. We loaded up on ant antidotes. My husband sprayed, powdered, and spread nuggets of disgusting stuff touted to send ants back to Ant-arctica. (Cue card: laugh.)

Every morning, we thumbed dozens of ants to smudged oblivion on the kitchen counters. The dried fruit armored against attack in canning jars seemed to be holding defense….until the morning my husband decided to go for a handful of his favorite trail mix.

Let’s just say as many ants as people at Chelsea’s wedding reception were having a gala among the nuts and dried fruits. I checked the lid. It was a one-inch turn from “tight.” Advance spies apparently figured out that they could crawl along the screw lines of the jar and enter the forbidden territory. Overnight, they were in full attack.

Well, I just dumped half a canning jar of trail mix into the garbage. It wasn’t worth trying to pick the ants out, no matter how much that stuff costs.
There’s got to be a lesson here, right? I think I found it in some notes I wrote in my Bible next to Solomon’s little-foxes verse. The great Bible teacher H.A. Ironside identified some spiritual foxes as:
*Carelessness
*Neglect of the Bible
*Neglect of prayer
*Neglect of fellowship with people of God
*Vanity, pride, envy, evil thinking, impurity
Each time we engage in one of those negative activities, it may seem a little thing. But like the ants in my kitchen, they’ll multiply until they make life miserable—for you and the ones you love.The defense mode? Each one’s opposite.

So, look to the ant (another Solomon saying, Proverbs 6:6). Better yet, I say, look forward to winter when they fade away for a long winter’s nap!