I lost a pet a little over a week ago and did not want to get into any fictional drama in my reading. I needed something comforting and wise. A copy of  The Chicken Chronicles had been laying on my bedside table. I knew it was finally time to read it.

I spent a long afternoon reading The Chicken Chronicles. It began with the recollection of growing up with chickens on her parents’ sharecropper farm in rural Georgia. The memory came to the surface when Alice was startled by a hen and her chicks crossing her path. She remarks that she felt as though she had never seen a chicken before. But if you know anything about Alice, you know that it can’t be true. She writes:

Though I grew up in the South where we raised chickens every year, for meat and for eggs, and where, from the time I was eight or nine, my job was to chase down the Sunday dinner chicken and wring its neck. But had those chickens been like this one? Why I hadn’t I noticed? Had I noticed?

Recalling those childhood memories Alice slowly began to realize that she missed chickens, chickens as “A Nation” she writes. And considering how often she ate eggs, she decided that she should learn more about them by having a few of her own.

Naming them curious names like Gertrude Stein, Agnes of God and Glorious, you’ll experience the ups and downs of caring for a brood of chickens and wonder at the chickens who regularly nap on her lap. You’ll think differently about eating meat, if you do so. You’ll reconsider the love you have for your animal friends. And Alice does all of this in her characteristically gentle way.

I read on Alice’s website about the chicken on the cover of the book. She notes the missing toenail and how she thought about sticking on a little fake one. But she then thought better of it and reflects on how she starting writing this book and the unexpected lessons she learned from her chickens :

Life gives us broken toenails and worse to let us remember where we’ve been and the struggles we’ve overcome . . . this is the book that grew on this blog, as I sat with my chickens in the outback of Mendocino, California.  I sat with them expecting nothing and over the months they pecked open places I hadn’t been able to enter by myself.  All of my “girls” have their toenails but occasionally, and though it is shocking it is natural, they lose their  feathers. (Source: Alice Walker’s official website)

I suppose I felt like I had lost all my feathers when I lost my beloved animal friend. Reading about the blessings, the memories and sorrows she has had with her chickens, I took away an intention to be more mindful of the animals who bring us the miracle of unconditional love.

The Chicken Chronicles by Alice Walker (New Press, May 2011)

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