Lisa Scottoline: What the cluck?

My life has been quiet lately.

But my chickens are partying, at my expense.

It’s been so crazy, I don’t even know where to begin.

Oh, wait, maybe I do, with Bradley Chicken Cooper, the rooster that is the source of my problems.

You may remember that I have a flock of about 25 chickens, and that one day I found out that one of the new chicks was, in fact, a rooster.

How does this happen?

Evidently it’s hard to tell whether a chick is a male or female when it’s little. In the vernacular, the chick wasn’t properly sexed.

I know what you’re thinking.

You haven’t been properly sexed, either.

Nor have I of late, at least outside of my imagination. Which also involves a certain Bradley, but that’s neither here nor there.

So in any event, that’s how I came to end up with a rooster and a drama.

Because what happened is that my formerly happy chicken coop of hens has become a cage match. The girls fight with each other constantly, pecking and competing for Bradley Chicken Cooper.

Which puts me in a bind, because of course I can’t get rid of the rooster because nobody wants a rooster for this very same reason, and besides, he’s named after Bradley Cooper. At this point, he’s a vehicle for a terrible pun and I need to make myself laugh.

Don’t you? Have you read the news lately?

So Bradley Chicken Cooper serves a purpose, living for our greater good.

Also I kind of like him, and he’s not cocky.

Sorry.

And as you may remember, he’s actually henpecked, because while they’re all fighting over him, they also fight with him, and at this point nobody has any tail feathers. It’s like the first few episodes of The Bachelor, and everybody wants to borrow him for a minute.

And worse, I had to buy what is called a chicken saddle, which is little jackets for the hens to protect them from each other‘s pecking, and now they wear matching pink jackets like they’re all on the same roller derby team.

The only hens who don’t fight are 10 years old and up, and they wisely show no interest in Bradley Chicken Cooper, since of course they don’t produce any eggs anymore, and neither would you.

They have their own coop, like a retirement village, except there’s no clubhouse.

I live in the clubhouse.

I’m the only member of the club.

So I realized I had to divide the young hens into the smaller groups, and separate the mean girls from the meaner girls, plus Bradley Chicken Cooper needed a man cave, now that football season is here.

Go, Birds!

Evidently my favorite kind of problem is one that costs me a lot of money, so I looked at catalogs of chicken coops, went online for chicken coops, and even drove around looking at other people’s chicken coops, the way I used to look at other people’s houses.

My porn has always been real estate, and now I have a new kind of porn, which is proof that healthy aging is all about finding new porn.

Um, I mean, interests.

The good news is that a chicken coop is cheaper than a house.

But when you have to buy a few of them, it starts to get expensive.

This week, I bought three more chicken coops, as the store gave me a special deal of the type that is given to insane middle-aged women.

Okay, me.

Consider that it cost about a hundred bucks for the chickens and about thirty bucks a month to feed them, but about three million bucks to house them, so at this point, if I get two eggs a day, they might be the most expensive eggs in the universe.

They do taste better than eggs from the store.

Not three million bucks better, but still, better.

Most people are house-poor, but I’m chicken house-poor.

And so now, instead of a single chicken coop in my backyard, I have a veritable development of chicken coops, which I am naming Buck-Buck Mews.

For all the bucks I’m spending.

It’s not a waste of money if it makes me laugh.

Or you.

Look for Lisa and Francesca’s humor collection, “I See Life Through Rosé-Colored Glasses,” and the paperback of Lisa’s bestselling domestic thriller, “Someone Knows,” in stores now. lisa@scottoline.com.

Copyright Lisa Scottoline 2019