The Day Henny Penny Crossed the Road.
Imagine a story of love, hope and a beautiful ending. As we walk our everyday lives, we discover things. We meet people and we create friendships along our journeys; but how many of us have met a chicken? A chicken that chose to trust in a home and those who lived in that very home. This is a story of love, hope and a beautiful ending. This is the story of Henny Penny.
She showed up in the fall of 2017. I wasn’t sure where she had come from. I assumed she had escaped the neighbor’s home several houses down. It would be a couple of years before I found out where she had lived previously.
At first, I tried to encourage her to leave. But she hunkered in and decided that this was to be her forever home. So each day she inched closer to the house, in hopes of befriending my mother and myself.
We continued to feed her and she continued to trust us to the point that she was eating out of our hands, literally. But she still wouldn’t allow us to touch her.
January arrived with coldness, as January does; but this time we welcomed fourteen inches of snow. This wasn’t common in the triad of North Carolina. I began to search for her. I welcomed the sounds of a faint chuck. She was nestled in a Leyland Cypress tree. Tucked away to what she found safety in, I found a way to bring her food and water and carefully approached her. This continued for five straight days.
From this point on, my mother and I knew she had chosen us. It was time to announce to her. We would call her Henny Penny. Her daily routine included wandering around the paddock among the horses and by nightfall she took to my flagpole as a roost. Many have broken since…
One evening the rain and winds picked up. Henny Penny was saturated and the flagpole was once again the roost she had chosen. I rushed to put on my raingear grabbing a ladder along with a towel. I was desperate to find safety for our new trusted friend. I climbed the ladder. The wind was howling and the rain was coming down. I knew my intentions and prayed she would trust me. With the sound of my voice, her frightened nature was calmed. I brought her inside, dried her, as best as you can dry a chicken. I placed her in a pet carrier and she instantly calmed to a sense of peace.
The years have passed since that record snowstorm as well as that rainy and stormy night. Today, Henny Penny comes to her name, has comfort in being picked up and held.
If you visit, you may hear a her peck at the door.
We are never alarmed as we know the language of new friend. It is time to come on in and lay an egg, as it is egg laying day. Henny Penny wants to go into her evening resting place to leave us an egg. She is the next-door neighbor to her kitty friend Skittles as they share the same space nearby in the comfort of their overnight cage spaces.
Skittles, a friend who Henny Penny has grown to love
We may never know the entire history of Henny Penny, as we continue to discover more and more as time goes on. If you ever wonder, why the chicken crossed the road? Maybe our story on how our chicken crossed a very busy roadway will come to mind. We know it was to live out the rest of her life in the best way. Did she know I was a veterinarian? We may never know; but both mom and I care for her today in the best way. Trusting us to house, medicate and feed her. That’s our chicken and we are blessed the day she chose a tree among our property.
“Saving the life of one animal won’t change the world, but the world will certainly change for that one animal”
Blog written by—-Teresa Klatt, DVM