Laid to rest

We said, Goodbye, Little Linda. We're sorry about all the horrible things we said about you.”

- MICHELE HEWITSON

Here at Lush Places, we are in mourning. For a chicken. Little Linda has died. She was perfectly fine in the morning and ate up her breakfast with customary gusto. She attacked her sisters, which was her favourite thing to do, before making a mess of my garden and pooping everywhere. Then she started panting and 20 minutes later was dead. Greg dug a grave for her under the alder trees where she liked to forage for bugs. We threw in a handful of her preferred treat: sunflower seeds. We cut some hydrangeas and put them in a jar and shed a tear. She was the worst chicken in the world, but she was our worst chicken in the world. The next day, her sisters were discovered digging up her grave. They knocked the jar of hydrangeas over. Astonishingly, they don’t appear to miss her. It is possible that chickens are not sentimental.

We will never know what killed her, but our best bet is that it was heat stroke. It can’t have been old age. She was the youngest of our flock of four.