Chickens

The Hendersons, an elderly couple, lived across the alley. Mrs. Henderson was large, rocked side to side when she walked; her husband was thin and knotted. I’d seen the rows of corn, but only learned about the chickens one morning soon after moving in, when I woke confused by what I’d heard. There it was again. A rooster. Right here in the city in 1984. From my upstairs window I could make out the chicken coop.

Throwing trash, I met Mr. Henderson in the alley one day. He said a city inspector came once to tell him he couldn’t have chickens. He demonstrated how he stonewalled. “I know nothing about those chickens. They was here before me.” The inspector went away and never bothered him again. He grinned. “Some people keep dogs,” he glanced at the pen in my nextdoor neighbor’s yard. “I keep chickens.” His opinion as to which was the superior choice was clear.

That backyard was a remembrance of rural childhood Mr. Henderson had recreated in retirement. For some years I watched his energetic work in the garden. It was his domain: Mrs. Henderson only went out there to hang laundry. Then he had a stroke. In warm weather they wheeled him out to take the sun, his head drooping toward his lap like one of his sunflowers in need of water. I don’t think he saw the empty chicken coop, the abandoned garden. When he died his widow sold and moved back to Louisiana, to one of those places where you acquire a yen for having dirt under your fingernails.

For a long time after that no one thought to have chickens in the city. People moved in, fixed the place up some, moved out, rented it and the house gradually got shabby again, a process of years. The renters we cringed to see were groups of young men. Their loud parties. The yard going to weeds. When a woman or two joined them, we breathed sighs of relief. Soon enough, the girls would hang curtains and send the boys into the yard with a rake. Great civilizers, women.

More time passed. Young couples started wanting to buy in the hood. They looked around, asked, “is it safe?” We’ve been asked that question often over the decades. I used to say, “if you’re a young black male, it can be quite unsafe.” Since my questioner is never black, you’d think that’d be reassuring, but they usually look uncomfortable. Much gang activity has moved elsewhere, so I’m not sure that’s still true. Sometimes I say, “depends on what you mean by safe. Last year Cherry Creek had higher burglary rates than we did.”

Sometimes I answer the question with another: “Are you asking because of the high school across the street? Because the biggest problem I’ve ever had with Manual is fast food trash kids drop on my sidewalk.” It’s a universal problem with teenagers, who think the world is their dumpster. Schools get endless complaints about it. Back when I taught, I rode across town with a busload of arts students to tour the new building we were going to move into the next fall. Pulling up, we passed an alley piled with trash. “Wow,” the kids gasped. “That,” declared another teacher, “is probably already our fault.”

Do I sound a trifle touchy? About the seemingly universal tendency to fear and mistrust teenagers? Or the recent influx of newbies to the hood? Don’t mind me. It’s just typical veteran attitude toward novices. And I’m a thirty-year veteran of teenagers and the hood. Besides, if you’re human, you resist change, even for the good. That deep-seated fear of the unknown gets us every time. The neighborhood wasn’t all good in the 80s by any stretch, but it was far from all bad. Easy now to pine for the sweet, forgetting the sour.

Young people with a baby and a dog moved in across the alley. They trimmed that splendid old crabapple by the garage that’s needed pruning for decades and painted the house. My feelings about the new wave entering the old hood are complicated, but mainly appreciative. Because of them, neglected Victorians are shining again. Because of them the neighborhood has a Facebook page and a website and we know way too much about what’s going on.

Today, in the backyard across the alley, I saw one black and one Rhode Island red. The primly lifted steps of their yellow feet, the glint of carmine combs in morning sun. Chickens are back. Only now they’re not illegal. Now it’s a thing. People who have never lived on one create miniature farms in the city, sharing seeds, fighting GMOs as best they can. The world changes. We can’t stop it and don’t always like where it’s going. The world changes, but sometimes pauses to save what nearly vanished. One day I look out my window and there are those chickens, thirty years later, pecking the dirt beneath the crabapple.