On Having Dry Chickens

You know how there’s that strange little sensation in the back of your mind when you’re not doing something you should be doing?

I live with this all the time, frankly. I have reached a point in my life where I can be fully productive while still procrastinating about things I’d rather not be doing in the first place and that sensation in the back of my mind is kind of like your neighbor’s car alarm these days in that it provokes neither alarm nor action, only the annoyed belief that someone ought to be doing something about it and whether that someone is the neighbor or police thwarting the car theft or just the car thieves being quick about it and getting the job done and over with, as long as the alarm stops you’re good either way and that’s as much attention to it as you’re going to pay, thank you.

But sometimes there is a different reason for it.

It occurred to us the other day that this was the first weekend in over a decade where a) the County Fair was starting in less than 72 hours and b) we weren’t washing chickens.

Lauren has aged out of the 4H now and even though we still have the chickens from last year there are no new ones and no need to bring any of them back from the barn, set up an assembly-line of large buckets full of warm water and various chicken-cleaning solvents, and put together a makeshift pen in the garage to store them overnight so they wouldn’t get filthy again if we took them back to the barn before we hauled them off to the Poultry Barn at o’dark-thirty to get them into their cages and ready for judging.

There is nothing on this earth more ridiculous than a wet chicken, and nothing quite as annoyed as a rooster in a darkened garage.

The rabbits remain unbothered and ungroomed as well, this year.

We haven’t raised turkeys in three years, but even there I sometimes feel the vague echo of a belief that I need to be finding giant cages so I can haul them around town in the van, or calling the processor for the Sad Appointment that always follows the Fair.

I’m not even going to discuss the year Lauren was in the Swine Project except to say that I remain eternally grateful to Andy for taking care of all of the swine housing and transportation requirements. Also, if you’ve never seen a 4H Swine Showmanship event you really should sometime, as it is quite possibly the only thing as ridiculous and wonderful as the wet chickens.

We’ll definitely go to the Fair at least once or twice this week, because it’s a lot of fun and we know how it works pretty well by now. There’s even an act we are interested in seeing that we might actually be able to see. You never know.

But we won’t be living at the Fairgrounds like we have done pretty much every year since 2009 (except for the Plague Year of 2020, which we will gloss over lightly for so, so many reasons). No small animals to mind. No theater productions to rehearse and put on. No art projects, photographs, or houseplants to be judged. We’ll be visitors. We probably won’t even buy the “All-Fair Pass” that we used to get from our 4H Club as a reward for helping out during the year.

Things change.

We’ll probably get a creampuff, though. You can’t skip those.