Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, suggests to the keeper that it may be time to reinsert into his chaotic life a “brooder house,” like the one he remembers from his boyhood farm days where he was wont to spend time in the small, Quonset hut-shaped structure soaking up the warmth with a hundred or so tiny peeping chicks.
To be richly entertained for hours by newly hatched chicks doubtless says certain things about the keeper’s mental limitations, things that have obviously followed him through his long life.
He only knows this: If he could spend a spring afternoon in a warm brooder house with the chicks, he would feel better on many levels. And if he could find an earthworm and create a chick melee by tossing it into the milling chicks, as he remembers doing, then his life would be complete.
A brooder house and a worm! It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
