Nothing is funny at 5 a.m.
Especially not a rooster crowing its lungs out while you’re trying to sleep.
Especially not on the first Monday morning of summer vacation.
Especially not when said rooster is in your backyard.
I tried to put the annoying sound out of my mind for a few minutes, as my body cried for sleep. But just like a snooze alarm, the rooster kept going – about every 30 seconds.
“Wait a second,” my mind finally stumbled into clarity – “In my backyard???”
Bleary-eyed and stumbling and unable to ignore the 5 a.m. fracas any longer, I made my way from bed to the window. I expected to see this early-rising rooster out past the backyard fence toward the barn lot or near my husband’s workshop, where he’s been known to wander.
But I raised the shade, and I’ll be darned if that fat red rooster wasn’t sitting right there in front of me on my window sill, crowing himself silly.
We looked at each other in surprise for a moment. I said nothing.
He said, “Cock-a-doodle-dooooooooooooooooo!”
I figured opening the window would shoo him away. When it didn’t, I did what anybody would do – drew back and punched that fat rooster as hard as I could right square in his hind end.
I said nothing is funny at 5 a.m., but I have to admit the surprised sound that rooster made when he suddenly became airborne was (a little) funny.
Now that I’d been rudely awakened and had sucker punched a rooster, I realized there would be no sleep in my immediate future until he was removed from my backyard. There’s no way I could lay my head back down on the pillow as long as he was out there – especially considering what he’d left me on the patio the last time he’d made a break from the henhouse.
So I trudged through the house, out the back door, onto the patio to gather my rooster-fighting arsenal. As I turned on the water hose and prepared to take aim, I inadvertently sprayed a little water on my swing. I don’t know who was more surprised, me or the OTHER rooster I had disturbed. He was sitting right there in my spot on the swing – with a chicken -- enjoying his start to the day immensely, having just taken his morning constitution by the sight of the mess next to them.
The sight of chicken-poo on my swing, one of my favorite things in the backyard, made me so mad that I couldn’t even enjoy the (a little) funny sound that rooster made as I sprayed him from his perch and sent his lady friend scrambling and squabbling to herself in his wake.
And now, at approximately 5:05 a.m. in the misty not quite morning light, the chase was on.
I sprayed torrents of water at two roosters and a hen, all the while shouting at them intermittently, “Get out of here, you chicken!”
But, no matter how I tried to direct the unruly trio out of the yard, they refused to go back out the way they came – through a hole my dog had evidently dug under the fence. We played a rousing game of “Ring Around the Trampoline” for a few minutes, as I’d chase them one way, and then the other, trying to get them out of the yard.
(I remember briefly thinking that I hoped my neighbors weren’t up to enjoy the sight of me in my pajamas and bare feet chasing roosters around the backyard with a water hose. They’ve already seen my previous adventures with escaped cows and miniature donkeys… But that’s another story.)
I digress…
The hen, who must have been the smartest or the most terrified of the three, made her way out somehow, because I was left with two roosters who stood directly outside my line of water-fire and watched me, daring me to come closer.
Muttering curses under my breath, I unwound the hose further and stalked out into the wet grass, spraying roosters and wondering how this day had started out so awry.
Roosters are not the smartest birds in the animal kingdom, evidently, because I finally had to drop the water hose, make my way all the way across the yard through the wet grass (did I mention I’m in my bare feet?) and fling the gate wide open before picking up the hose and issuing the rooster an engraved invitation to leave my yard. One rooster finally exited, complaining to himself the whole way of the indignity.
Rooster 2 had run to the opposite side of the yard, and I had to repeat the whole open gate, issue invitation, close gate, with him. Meanwhile, our four miniature donkeys are standing there watching the whole scene play out with something akin to amusement on their faces.
“And they call us asses,” you could just hear them commenting among themselves.
With the chickens having vacated the yard, I turned my hose to the swing and the window sill, where the evidence of the morning’s early antics still lay in wait.
Stupid chickens.
Finally, with a clean swing and window sill and chicken mission accomplished, I shut the water hose off and sighed as I tried to salvage what was left of my opportunity to sleep before my kids wake up and the day really gets going. Ha.
But instead, I’m sitting here at my keyboard, writing it all down for posterity just in case at some point later in life I’ll be able to look back and see that some things at 5 a.m. are (a little) funny.
P.S. In completely unrelated news, we will be having a big batch of barbecued chicken at my house this weekend. Y’all come.
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