The House of Endless Soap and Water

(Chapter 8 from the book "The Chicken Who Didn't Know Where to Lay Her Eggs")


April only lived half a mile from her mother, but to Shellie it felt like a million miles away.

When Paula didn't come home, April had come to Mike's house, picked up Shellie and Dingo, and moved them up the road to her house.

April had only lived there three years. After she had finished college, she had gotten a teaching job in the town nearby and gotten married. She and her husband had bought a house in town. A couple of years later, April had given birth to Tadpole.

But the marriage didn't last. The reason why varied depending on whom you asked. According to April, it was because her husband spent more time on the softball field than he did at home. According to Mike, it would have taken a very special man to stay married to April. He didn't go so far as to say exactly what kind of special man. Paula had never expressed her opinion on the matter.

After getting a divorce, April and Tadpole moved into the empty cottage on the farm. Mike had renovated it for her from top to bottom.

April had a lot more rules in life than her mother. Her main two rules were cleanliness and orderliness. She was an immaculate housekeeper. She swept and mopped the floor in at least one room in her house every day. All the towels in her bathroom were always perfectly folded and matched. She kept detailed lists of all she had to do and whether she had done them. Mike had also hired her to keep his books. He realized that she was better and more thorough at it than any of the professional bookkeepers he had ever hired.

April also had strict rules for Shellie and Dingo. On their first day there, April told them that they could come into the kitchen but no further. She wouldn't let them go into the living room, dining room, or any other part of the house. Everything there was shiny clean and in perfect order. Her house had no dust, feathers, dog hairs or fleas. April told Shellie and Dingo she wanted to keep it that way.

During the first week there, Shellie and Dingo didn't even have a dog door. Every time they wanted to go in and out, they had to let April know.

Shellie found this very inconvenient and equally stressful. In the past, she had always been able to go in and out of her house anytime she wanted. Dingo also found it annoying. At first, he just sat there and waited for April to show up. But then he became impatient and began to bark and whine when he wanted to get in or out. April fussed at him, but at least she came to open the door.

Mike had offered to install a dog door for April, but she had at first resisted. She said that she didn't want to ruin a perfectly good back door.

But after a week of having to open the door for Shellie and Dingo countless times a day and listening to Dingo bark and whine, she finally changed her mind.

Once the new dog door was installed, Shellie felt much better. Even though she would have much preferred being back at home with Paula, at least she now had some of the freedom to come and go she used to have.

Still, there were a lot of things that Shellie missed. She missed sitting on Paula's lap while they watched baseball games together. She missed the stroke of Paula's hand on her back and the sweet tone of Paula voice as she talked to Shellie about the things she couldn't talk to anyone else about. She missed the late afternoon fishing trips and sitting in the boat with Paula and Dingo.

April kept the door from the kitchen to the rest of house closed at all times. Shellie had once slipped into the dining room, but April had immediately shooed her back into the kitchen with a broom. Dingo had also tried to get past the kitchen door. He hadn't even made it into the dining room.

Shellie soon noticed that life with April was also different in a number of other ways.

April didn't like to go fishing, and she never dug earthworms for Shellie. April wouldn't even touch an earthworm. Anytime she saw one, she got a very squeamish look on her face and took a few steps backward as if it were a rattlesnake. She also wouldn't touch any kind of insect or anything else that crawled. Paula had always picked such creatures up right away. If the creature was small enough and looked like something a chicken might like, she always offered it to Shellie to eat.

But Shellie found one ray of hope. At least Tadpole was there. Tadpole wasn't afraid of earthworms and other things that crawled. He loved catching and feeding them to Shellie as much as Paula did.

Tadpole also liked going fishing. He wasn't as good at it as Paula, but at least he went every now and then. And he took Shellie and Dingo with him.

Sometimes, though, a fishing trip with Tadpole didn't involve a lot of fishing. Tadpole would take a pole and earthworms with him, but if he didn't get a bite right away, his mind would start to wander. That usually led to him doing a number of other things – such as digging holes with Dingo, constructing forts out of any branches and logs he could find around the pond, building dams in the water, and, if the weather was warm enough, swimming in the pond. To him, mud and water were the essence of life. April frequently commented that he had been a pig in a former life.

Every time Tadpole was getting ready to go fishing, his mother specifically told him not to go swimming. She told him she was worried about all the snakes and gators in the water. Besides, she didn't like him coming home soaking wet and covered with mud. Tadpole tended to track the mud into the house, which irritated April more than anything in the world.

But being the farm boy he was, Tadpole usually forgot what his mother told him. He would end up going swimming and then come home wet and muddy. Even though his mother had told him hundreds of times before not to track mud into the house, he did just that.

His mother finally got so tired of cleaning up the mud that he tracked in the house that she hooked up a hose with a sprayer on the end at the back door. When Tadpole came home muddy, his mother would make him strip down to his underwear and spray himself off. Only then could he come in the house. The hose and spray got used a lot.

Tadpole didn't mind spraying himself off. He rather enjoyed it. He also loved squirting the water high in the air or turning it into a light spray and spraying a fine mist across the lawn.

He enjoyed spraying everything and everyone else as well. That included Shellie and Dingo.

Shellie and Dingo hated the water sprayer. Both of them despised getting wet. Dingo would always run off to find a place to hide every time Tadpole turned the water on.

Shellie would try to get away, but she wasn't always successful. Tadpole had a very good aim with the sprayer. He was as good with it as he had been with his pineapple pear catapult machine.

Shellie and Dingo also had another reason for trying to avoid the water sprayer. If they got wet, April would block off the dog door and not let them even into the kitchen. That meant they often had to spend long afternoons or evenings outdoors. She often wouldn't let them inside until right before she went to bed.

Shellie and Dingo soon learned to stay away from Tadpole after the three of them came home from fishing. Dingo would go hide behind the barn and Shellie would go perch in the dogwood tree in the front yard. The hose wasn't long enough for Tadpole to reach them there.

Shellie was at least happy that she wasn't Dingo. Since he had come to live with April, he got a bath almost everyday.

April wouldn't let him in the kitchen unless he was absolutely clean.

For Dingo, that was next to impossible. He spent large parts of every day digging after rabbits, rats or moles. He came home covered with dirt and dust almost every day.

April inspected him carefully several times a day. If she found any dirt on him, she would fill up the bath bucket she kept by the back porch and soap Dingo down. She would finish off the job by spraying him down with Tadpole's hose.

Shellie tried not to get involved in any of this. She figured there wasn't much she could do. She couldn't stop Dingo from digging, and she certainly couldn't stop April from filling up the bath bucket. She clearly understood that a chicken had only so much say in what dogs and humans did.

Personally, Shellie had never minded if Dingo got dirty. She had usually found it to her benefit since he always picked up a few fleas when he dug, and she could then peck them off.

Since she and Dingo had moved in with April, however, Dingo had stayed so clean that Shellie hadn't had even a single flea to eat. She also hadn't had any corn. April didn't let Shellie sit on her lap during baseball games and feed her kernels of corn every time her favorite team hit a home run.

April didn't even watch baseball. She was always too busy. She rarely even turned the TV on.

During the day, she taught school. She usually left the house at 7:30 every morning and didn't get home to 4:30 or 5:00 in the evening. Then she had to cook supper for Tadpole and herself. Rarely did she have more than a few minutes each day for Shellie and Dingo. They largely had to find their own sources of entertainment.

When April fed them, she always gave them the same thing. Shellie got chicken pellets, and Dingo got dry dog food from a large bag. Paula had always fed both Shellie and Dingo a little bit of whatever she was eating. April never did that. She certainly fed them enough, but just nothing special.

The most Shellie and Dingo could hope for was that Tadpole would drop some food on the kitchen floor. He tended to do that quite a bit. Even though April frequently told him not to eat with his mouth open, he did anyway. Things were constantly dropping from one corner of his mouth or the other.

But Shellie and Dingo had to be fast in such cases. Otherwise, April would immediately wipe the food up. She liked to keep her kitchen floor sparkling clean. She often stated that a gritty kitchen floor was worse than sand in her eyes.

Shellie found such a comparison unfathomable. She loved the feel of earth under her feet and between her claws.