http://www.raisingbakersfield.com/home/Blog/TwinZebra/25980 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 &quot;Save the ta tas.&quot; 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?&nbsp; 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. 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 &quot;Save the ta tas.&quot; 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?&nbsp; 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. en-us <p>Oh, I feel for you.  That garbage bag in the heat - eeewwww.  These 3 days can't pass soon enough for you, I'll bet. :)</p> http://www.raisingbakersfield.com/home/Blog/TwinZebra/25980/#c_233591 http://www.raisingbakersfield.com/home/Blog/TwinZebra/25980/#c_233591 <p>Oh, I feel for you.  That garbage bag in the heat - eeewwww.  These 3 days can't pass soon enough for you, I'll bet. :)</p>