I guess it was about six years ago when a black chicken showed up at the shop. She just showed up and sorta acted like a mother hen about the place.
I named her "Cluck". Actually she named herself you might say.
Now I've had guard cats and house dogs and shop varmints. But none of them can hold a candle to having a yard chicken for company.
A dog will sit there and grin with a wagging tail just cause you noticed. You can cuss or praise and all you're gonna git is a grin and a tail wag.
Of course cats don't give you that. I strongly suspect that cats were given us just to reassure them that they're gawd's chosen.
But Cluck had some personality and she appreciated a good joke. I could whup out a one liner and she'd just cackle.
One evening I came in from a job and Cluck was on the floor of the shop instead of up in her chop box nest. So I picked her up put her in her chop box nest. I don't think she bumped her butt on the straw. She was flying over my head for the far corner before I got my hands down to head level.
So I grabbed a five gallon step'emup ladder and peeked in to see what the fuss was all about.
You see Cluck paid rent. She contributed these purty brown eggs with big deep orange yokes.
A big old chicken snake was coiled up there on her nest and he had a severe lip lock on the rent. That was my rent. And since he only had a severe lip lock we had us a wrestling match for the rent. I won.
I tossed the wannabe rent thief into a thirty gallon trash can and went home. I'd had a hard day and wrestling snakes makes me tireder.
I called around my buds to see what was the proper thing to do with a chicken snake. The most common response was to make two of them.
I'm not much into killing things. And the rent thief had just been doing what chicken snakes do. Can't hardly justify killing them for just doing what they do.
I had a job down in University Park to finish up. An automatic gate for a rear entry home. University Park is part of the Park cities where the real estate doubles in price just because it's got Park after it's name.
So I put the snake on the truck. I figure if the snake jumps off the truck at seventy on seventy five then I didn't kill it. It committed suicide.
The job was for a couple with two little boys. She, the mama, was a high dollar psychologist or psycharitist or something along that line. He, the daddy, was a money manager. You know one of them silver spooners that's went to all the right schools and gets the job of watching the kids and the family money. Great folks, wonnerfull kids, even better customers, can't say enough good things about them.
We was talking him and me as I was setting up. I reached in to grab my welding cable out of it's bin. I don't care how big or how bad you are. When you reach in for a welding cable while talking to a customer you are gonna leave some bad words on the ground when that hand comes back not with a welding cable but a snake.
I kicked them bad words up under the truck sorta sly like. They're good people and probably never heard such except when they went to the movies.
When I paused a minit while changing rods I looked over and the dad was teasing the snake with a spare welding glove I carry on the truck. I asked him to stop. He did.
As we settled up he told me to make good and sure that snake was still on the truck when I left. If'n his wife found out about that snake even being here she'd have him all night out in the yard with a flashlight looking for it. Plus he'd probably have to put her back in therapy. Evidently she'd just got out.
I haven't seen that snake since. But I like to think it's down there in University Park. Nice neighborhood, lots of pets, parrots too.