Taking Back Chicken Mountain
From Planet 222
by Rachel Trezise
Rachel Trezise reclaims her grandfather's Treorchy chicken run from bramble and long-gone landowners, remembering happy childhood mornings letting out the hens at first light, only for a vicious turf war to break out...
Saturday afternoons at my grandparents’. The raw spring sunshine reflecting on the wall above the fireplace in the living room. Cheering from the rugby field in the town below us echoing up the valley. In the kitchen my grandmother’s making pie: corned beef, blackberry, crab apple, one of these. ‘Fingertips,’ she says sieving the flour lightly through her age-thickened digits, imploring me to learn. ‘It’s all in the fingertips… keep them co–’ I interrupt her lesson, shrieking with a six-year-old’s delight at the sight of a brown-feathered hen staring sideways at us through the window. ‘Chickadee!’ I shout at the hen. All my grandfather’s chickens were called Chickadee; all the cats, Mr Tibbs.
The new generation of Chickadee© Rachel Trezise
