The Honest Courtesan

I usually buy my chicks as soon as they become available at my local Tractor Supply store, around the last week of February or the first of March.  But for some reason, they arrived late this year, and then the store management kept giving me problems: they wouldn’t tell me when chicks were coming, then wouldn’t hold the ones I wanted for the half-hour it took me to get there, etc.  So I went to the feed store over in the county seat, only to find that their policy was the opposite, chicks by preorder only.  However, the manager had a few of the type I wanted (red layers) from a cancelled order, so she sold them to me. They were slightly older than I usually buy them, with visible wing-feathers instead of being just fluffballs.  But because I was unwilling to trust Tractor Supply after the runaround treatment, I went ahead and got them.  So now we’ve finally reached the time of year when there is a box of tiny dinosaurs in my bathroom; alas, they don’t stay cute long, and soon they’ll just be ugly chickens who don’t lay eggs yet, out in the henhouse with the adult hens.  But for three weeks (only two more by the time you read this), I can’t help smiling whenever I go in there.