The Hen Spa

Just the other week, my home came alive with the arrival of kids and grandkids. We had toys and noise, melting snow and mud, cuddles and kisses, homemade beer and cider, bubble baths and bedtime stories, fabulous dinners and divine desserts.

When they left, the house felt empty. But I’ve learned about empty nests. How to deal with them, and how not to.

The first time our nest emptied — when our last child flew the coop, so to speak — Terry and I hit on the idea of filling it again. With chickens. Blinded by visions of free-range eggs and the companionable clucking of pretty white birds, I researched (a little) and came upon the design for something called a Hen Spa.

The Hen Spa is one of those ideas that sound really good: a moveable, two-story cart like an overgrown wheel barrow with a hinged lid for easy cleaning. On the ground level, the chickens can graze on grass and bugs from within the safety of a chicken-wire barrier. A ramp gives them access to the enclosed upper level roost. When the grass beneath the Spa has been eaten, you simply flip a lever, lift the Spa with its two handles, and roll it to a new spot with fresh, green grass.

As the Guinness men would say: Brilliant!

Never one to shy from a project, Terry got to work and soon we had a Hen Spa with barn-red siding, a corrugated fiberglass roof, and sweet little sliding doors to access the roosts for egg collecting.

A trip to Baroda City Mills netted us a dozen yellow chicks. We kept them warm in a cardboard box in our kitchen, charmed by their peeps and scratchings until they were big enough to be moved to the Hen Spa. 

They were better than television. We couldn’t get enough of watching them. When we came home from work we let them out to range in the yard and had our cocktail hour out there. Oh, the long summer evenings in the yard devoted to chicken watching! Our friends, God bless ‘em, didn’t laugh too loudly.

Fast forward to October. Coming home from work in the gloom of shortening days. Hurrying outside to lift the lid of the Hen Spa, to feed and water the full-grown fowl, swearing as they try to escape into the night, their straw getting soaked in the cold rain, me getting soaked in the cold rain, fighting the wind to close the damned lid, swearing as the wind catches the lid and rips its hinges from the wooden siding . . .

Let me just say that we live in a rural area. Surrounded by farmers and families who’ve raised chickens all their lives. People who KNOW chickens. So there’s no excuse for our ignorance.

As the summer had waxed and waned, we’d been dismayed by the dearth of eggs. It takes six months, someone finally told me, until they’re ready to lay.

Oh. Okay.

But those six months took us into October — when chickens stop laying eggs for the winter.

What???

I can still remember my reaction to the woman who informed me of this detail. Oh, you can electrify the coop and run heat lamps to trick them into laying — in a coop. But in a free-wheeling Hen Spa? Hah!

We did get an egg that October. One egg. The most expensive egg, Terry observed, ever laid.

And what did we have now? Have you ever smelled ten chickens living in an eight-by-four space? Seen how much shit the damnable fowl produce? Noticed how they insist on shitting into their own water trough and food? This is worse than babies, worse than two a.m. feedings and dirty diapers. At least those can be dealt with in the comfort of a warm house. At least they grow up and get potty trained.

So there I was. Facing off with winter, envisioning wrestling with that lid in a blizzard. Wondering how I was supposed to keep their shit-filled water trough unfrozen. How I was supposed to wheel the Hen Spa to a new, clean location through two feet of snow. And why I was subjecting myself to all this frustration anyway.

The chickens were destined for the soup pot.

But I couldn’t think of eating the birds myself. I’d held them in the palm of my hand! When they were babies! When they were adorable visitors from a child’s Easter basket!

My sons and their college roommates were thrilled with their care packages that autumn.

And the Hen Spa? We’ve renamed it. Now it’s the Boat House.