When the chickens come home to roost

In his youth, my husband spent a lot of time with cute chicks--and ducklings and goslings and whatever you call baby turkeys. His family once had a huge hatchery in northern Ohio, but by the time Garry started working there (at age 9!), it had morphed into a feed-and-seed/garden equipment store that sold baby chicks and other fowl every spring. When other boys were messing with cars, he was raising poultry.

Now we don't have any poultry at our house but we've always had a lot of chicken tchotchkes. Garry's Gram was known far and wide as the Chicken Lady, so people used to give her chicken stuff: stuffed chickens, ceramic chickens, chicken salt-and-pepper shakers, a chicken teapot that would regurgitate tea right into your cup. When Gram died, her grandsons divided up all the chicken stuff, so we've always had some corner of the house where the chickens came home to roost. In one house we even had chicken wallpaper and chicken curtains, and I confess that I once cross-stitched a chicken sampler. Over the years, friends have noticed our chickens and have added to the collection. You just can't keep those chicken tchotchkes from multiplying.

So you can imagine how delighted I was to find chickens in my daughter's kitchen. She tore down tacky wallpaper all over the house, but she decided to keep the chicken border in the kitchen. I offered to give her those old chicken curtains, but they're the wrong size and the wrong color for the kitchen. So instead I gave her one of our chickens, a lovely jointed wooden chicken who can sit on the stove and rule the roost. It's good to see the family tradition continuing.

This just in: the resident poultryman informs me that the correct term for baby turkeys is "poults." When they're small, you can call them paltry poultry. Or not.