Peacock Ranching
I used to raise peacocks. You ever seen peacocks strutting thru a South End shack yard, it’s sorta otherworldly. They brought an elegance that was indescribable to our backwash palace. You ever HEARD one of these exotic creatures, you might reconsider classing up the bottom land. They got a scream like a child being tortured. I guarantee the neighbors will wear out 911 with their calls of mayhem and madness at your place. Course when I had the peacocks, we didn’t have neighbors. No, they didn’t move away because of the noise, they just hadn’t discovered the fabulous South End yet.
My peacocks, no offense to you Bird Huggers out there – my peacocks had a head about the size of a big martini olive. And inside that head they had a brain the size of, well, a pea. My peacocks were not bright. They made a chicken look like Albert Einstein. They thought my Banty hen, who’d hatched their eggs, they thought she was not only Einstein, but their mama and God too. Don’t ask me what I was thinking. My brain isn’t real big either. Although I’m pretty sure who my mama is but don’t ask me about Pop. I’m like the peacocks – I just go on faith.
I had the peacocks a few years until Mama Banty got picked off by a Wily Coyote. They wouldn’t come back to the henhouse after that, so they roosted in the cedars every night. Dumb or not, they figured out the climbing ability of a coyote. Finally they decided to go looking for Ma. The Police Blotter in the Stanwood Gazette – and this is the Gospel Truth – would report on their progress north. Peacock sighting at Dahlman Road. Peacocks seen gathering at Sunnyshore. Eventually they found a chicken surrogate ma up by O-Zi-Ya. O-Zi-Ya is Southendomish, meaning, I think, Ornithological Orphanage.
Sometimes I miss those little pea-brains. Although I can sleep longer w/o an alarm clock that sounds like a nightmare. I wonder, though, if I’d kept em, if the South End mighta stayed, oh, I don’t know, less developed. Maybe forced the new neighbors to move north instead.
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