I thoroughly enjoy my brief window of being all but worshipped by my children. I am all powerful, capable of righting any wrong and healing any wound.

I remember the exact moment I lost this magic sense of wonder about my father. I was maybe 7 or 8, and some small appliance had broken and he couldn't fix it. My dad was pretty handy, and up until that moment I thought he could fix anything. When he threw up his hands on this project, I blinked with disbelief. Could it be he was...gasp!...merely human? Capable of failure?  The revelation was genuinely shocking.

But my 3-year-old still thinks I am so much more than I am.

At lunch the other day, he protested the meal of the day. It was nasty, he declared, and folded his arms over the bowl.

"No it's not," I said. "Eat."

J. shook his head emphatically. "It is," he insisted. "Look."

He proceeded to shovel a bite into his mouth, screwed up his face in disgust, and then looked at me, palms up and shoulders shrugged.  "See?"

"It's fine and I want you to eat your lunch," I said.

J. was incredulous. "No, look!" he said, and took another bite, then shuddered. "See?"

It took me a minute to realize J. was certain he had proved his point because he thought I could taste what he was chewing. Surely if he was grossed out by what was in his mouth, I must somehow have been able to psychicly connect to his tastebuds to feel what he felt and taste what he tasted.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I don't have that particular psychic mom vibe. I do, however, have a soft heart, so I gave him an apple and excused him from the table.

I moved to Bakersfield to live with my mother and take advantage of free child care for a couple years until my 3-year-old is in school. Having mostly lived in big cities, it's been a culture shock. I didn't think things could get any weirder, but they have.

On my way home from K.'s weekly gymnastics class, I passed the Cal State Bakersfield campus and discovered they were hosting this big Relay for Life race and festival to raise money for breast cancer research.

Good cause, and we had nothing better to do, so I stopped. We ate, played carnival games, blah blah blah.

At one booth they were doing face painting for a dollar, a service advertised chiefly by the completely bald man sporting, on the back of his head, a painted pink ribbon over the slogan "Save the ta tas." K. got a butterfly painted on her cheek.

J. desperately needed a nap, so we cut the festivities short about 1 pm.

Two hours later, I woke J. and took the kids out into the backyard, which was a novel experience for them because my mother has a pool with no fence, so the kids are under strict orders to NEVER go back there unless an adult is out there with them.

Usually that's my mother, but I had to go out with them today because my mom works weekends. It was the first time, sadly, I've spent any real time back there.

Not 30 minutes into a makeshift baseball game with the extra thick, kid-sized plastic bat and whiffle ball, I hear rustling in the trees that separate our house from our right-side neighbor. I narrow my eyes and see something black hopping around the branches over the fence, and it's way too big to be a raven or crow. Only when the thing landed beside the pool did I realize it was a chicken.

An actual, live chicken.

Now, I spent the first half of my childhood in Chicago, and even as a teenager in Albuquerque we were in a very urban area, so my experience with chickens is pretty much limited to zoos and school field trips to farms. I have never, in my 41 years on this earth, had a chicken casually plop into my yard.

I stood there, dumbfounded, while the children shrieked with delight. It occurred to me that my mother had mentioned something about one of her neighbors having chickens. They are evidently very polite creatures. I've been here over a month and hadn't ever seen or heard one.

The chicken was quite comfortable around people. The sight of my children jumping up and down screaming and pointing didn't alarm her one bit. She just toured the edges of the yard, scratching for...food?  What do chickens eat, anyway?

She didn't so much as glance at the rotting lemons that had fallen from my mother's lemon trees, so I guess they're not big fruit fans.

But that got me thinking that we really ought to either eat the lemons or pitch them, since rotting lemons don't look so hot after a while. So I grabbed a garbage bag and started collecting lemons in various stages of decay off the ground. That's when I spotted the other chicken.

The dead one.

Apparently the poor slob had been there a while. It was pretty much just a mound of feathers with some claws sticking out. It took me a minute to figure out what it was. At first I thought it was a pile of rags.

Dead chickens, I would think, are even more of a health hazard than rotting lemons. But I was not about to touch the thing with my bare hand. CNN sound bites about avian flu, West Nile virus and other diseases flashed through my mind.

For a fraction of a second I considered leaving it there. After all, it had been resting peacefully for at least a month or two, from the look of it. It wasn't MY chicken. It wasn't even my yard, technically. But then I decided that if one is to live off of one's mother without paying rent, removing a dead chicken now and then is the least one can do. So I donned rubber dishwashing gloves and grabbed a dustpan from the garage and deposited the thing in the garbage bag with the lemons.

The bag now sits on the side of the house awaiting trash day, which is three days from now.

The kids have been down for the night for over an hour and there is still clucking in the backyard as I write this. I wish our uninvited guest a long, healthy life, and strong wings with which to find her way over the fence again, cuz I've met my monthly quota for carrying chickens.