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Rural Preservation The Sunny Side of Spencer Butte
The Chicken House
Harry Taylor, our old neighbor, once owned the land where he had worked as a farm hand as a youth.. He had worked hard all his life in a hardscrabble existence. This meant making do with what was on hand for most of his needs, rather than putting out cash for"store-bought" goods. The barn door hinges were oak limb sections with a pin through the knotted end for example. The chicken house was another example. Our chicken house is one of the casualties of this transition. In 1952 almost every countryside dwelling had chickens scratching around the yard. Today one rarely sees a chicken at home as one drives through the countryside. Our chicken house fell down, taking with it a lifetime of memories. Harry Taylor built it, and fixed it up handily with a covered nesting box having room for several hens, a roost arrangement that enclosed droppings away from the chickens, a feedbox with compartments for scratch grain, mash, and oyster shells, built up off the floor and with a perch where the hens could stand to eat. Another thing that Harry did for his chickens seemed to me very innovative. There is a winter time stream channel that runs through the yard, and Harry made a "fence" to fill the channel during the dry season so the chickens couldn't walk out under the woven wire. He placed a round pole across the stream, each end of it in a cradle where it could rotate as needed. To the pole he attached boards shaped to fit into and fill the channel. When it rained in the winter the water floated the boards up and flowed down stream under them. When the channel was dry they hung to the ground and filled the space. That was more than fifty years ago, and he built an addition several years after we came here, with space for another 25 to thirty birds where they could safely scratch around inside in stormy weather, and at all times be protected from marauding animals. Coons as well as wandering dogs could not get at them there. Those memories of the chicken house include a feisty rooster that would jump on the back of an unsuspecting body come to gather eggs or fill the water fountains. A coiled rattlesnake by the door made my heart jump one evening at dusk when I went to shut the henhouse door for the night. The chickens had a fenced yard where they could scratch and dust themselves during daylight hours in good weather. I went to tend my flock one Christmas morning and found marauders had destroyed all but two of the hens. They had buried themselves successfully in the woodpile nearby. The dogs had burst through a chickenwire screened window to get in, and left an escape route for a few of the fleeing birds. This was the second time the flock had been decimated within a couple of years. Since we were not raising grain on the land, and the price of laying mash for the hens was more than the cost of eggs from the store, we did not restock with a new flock. I do miss those hens scratching around the barnyard, even yet. A friend, once visiting, told me our white rock hens looked like ballet dancers with their slim legs below their white fluffy tutus. We were cleaning the manure out from under the roost, gathering useful fertilizer for the garden one time. A shovel full of droppings came out loaded with a half-dozen naked pink baby rats. That was a very unexpected find because we had not been bothered with rats before. Speculation determined that rats must have invaded from the city dump which was in use at that time not far away on the west side of Spencer Butte at 54th Street. Harry told of finding dead chickens occasionally on the roost on a morning when the door had been inadvertently left open at night. A barn owl would come stand beside a roosting hen and open the bird's neck for blood, leaving the body there when it died. One of my warmest memories is of the contented talk of those biddies as they scratched through the straw on the floor, and of their excited cackle prompted by each fresh-laid egg. Disuse and neglect set in after the last chickens were gone. Under the oaks above, a carpet of licorice ferns took root on the roof shakes, holding moisture to hasten decay. The roof began to leak. A wall sagged. The door began to drag on the ground, no longer free to swing open. The boys stored a pile of obsidian in one corner of the empty building. Its weight proved too much for rotting floor boards and gently aided their disintegration. Now the rocks rest on the earth two feet lower than the remaining floor. One stormy winter day our grandsons asked if they might build a "fort" in the chicken house. With permission, they dug up rotten floor and added their constructions under what remained of a protecting roof. It has taken several years for the final collapse to take place, but my heart still cherishes a warm and lively picture of productive activity, a vital part of our home landscape for many years. Just this month what was left of the building has been burned. When I playfully accused the fireman of burning up my chicken house, he jokingly replied. "Oh, no. I didn't burn it down. I burned it up. It FELL down!" Copyright © 2001 by Lois Barton See Lois Barton's other tale this issue -- A Tale of the Old Man and The Fairies
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