GiGi All Gone

The kids love the chickens. Especially our super freak looking chicken, Gigi that Nathan named GI Joe but since she's a girl he calls her GiGi.

Well, called her GiGi. As Lilly says, when we couldn't find GiGi this morning, "GiGi all gone."

Yep. The summer of Gigi, we only had her a summer. I am a terrible chicken owner. They come and go from our lives faster than Elizabeth Taylor's husbands. Unfortunately, Gigi disappeared into the claws of a hawk, or opossum, or raccoon. Hopefully not coyote, since I don't like to think coyotes can get in our yard.

But this is not easy, this losing of pets. We get attached. I flail, when Nathan says, "We shouldn't have pets because they die." I feel my heart squeeze. He's right. I feel the same way. We love them and they make us laugh, and they keep us entertained and then they're gone. Maybe we should've fenced the roof of their area. Maybe we should have kept them all locked up. The four remaining chickens are locked up tonight, from fear.

But what kind of life is that? The kind where chickens get to resume living each day, you say?

It is a terrible feeling. I'm the one who spent all the time with the chickens. Gigi layed us an egg reliably every day except Sunday. When she went to church. The chicken had her priorities right. She was in charge of the food. She had crazy feathers that stuck out all over, she looked like a biker chicken. She was tough. Why she had to go and not our other, less interesting chickens... She probably threw herself in their path. She sacrificed for the family. The sacrificial chicken.

There is this black feeling, where the chicken used to be. It is a depressing thing, feeling this hole an animal leaves when they leave your life. We try to give our chickens a perfect life, and she had the most perfect life, not a cage in sight. But obviously there was death in sight. We let her down. She deserved more. I didn't protect her, and last night, in that rain storm, without noise or feathers left behind, that was it. She vanished. We need night time protection, suddenly.

I told the kids we had to have a ritual to memorialize Gigi so she won't be forgotten. She was our greatest chicken. All the others had stopped laying for winter, but not Gigi. She was just sitting on the nest happily yesterday. Making her green egg for us. I didn't know it was our last.

Our other chicken Cake is gone too. Very tame, very social. It's killing me.

I guess tomorrow I have to look into some chicken wire. I plan to wire the sky, and keep everything out. But as I told Nathan, it's still right to love things, even if they go away, even when it feels like the most wrong, most dangerous thing to do because there is surely hurt at the end. Hurt is just the body's way of saying hey, Gigi, you mattered to me.