The Blond Bomb Shell

  She is a blond bombshell and there is nothing on this earth that she wants more then to be a mother. So strong is this desire that before the wee hours of the morning, before even the sun has broken clear of the timberline on the eastern mountains, she moves quietly past her sleeping roommates, climbs to the second story and escapes through a cracked window.

   Racing silently across the frosted grass, she slips into the tangled deadwood of the old rose bush. Once there she settles down onto the thick bed of dead leaves and waits. So quietly she waits, unmoving in the dim light. Waiting and listening to her friends as they awaken. Waiting as the light grows brighter. Prepared to defend her location for hours and at all cost.

   I find her there every morning, glaring out at me with a look on her face that warns me to keep my distance. I promise to keep my distance, for now. Off I go to do my chores, wondering all the while... why the rose bush and not the solid warm walls of the house.

 Perhaps it is her wild ancestors whispering to her from another time and half a hemisphere away. Her ancestors lived in the steamy tangled jungles of South America.

  She is an Americauna hen,with golden yellow plumage, a cross of an Anacauna jungle fowl raised by jungle tribes for their lovely blue eggs. Blondie as she is known, lays a blue green egg, just a pale tint of the whisper from her family to the south. She guards her family jewel, hissing at me when ever I get to close or another hen drops by to see her.

  I let her stay there setting on her hopes and dreams, feeling bad about what I must eventually do. I wait untill all the other hens have gone back to the coop for the night and the darkness has swallowed the mountain. Quickly I grab her and pull her from her thorny nest.

"Sorry Blondie", I say softly as she tucks beneath my arm. "Mr. Fox will eat you if I leave you out all night"

 I scoop up the egg and hold it up to the moonlight as we walk back to the hen house. The egg almost glows and I wonder if somewhere deep below the roll of the southern hemisphere, if another deeper blue egg glows as brightly or hold as much hope for a little hen, as this one.

  I set Blondie into the golden light of the hen house and make her a promise.

 " Maybe in the spring Blondie, I'll let you hatch them all".