Old Wet Hen

Now that the fall season in Texas has lasted all of one week, we will be getting our first freeze here in a couple of days.  I guess the hot days of summer are truly gone…for a couple of months, anyway.  This means that Opal Chicken will have to wait awhile for her next bath.  Believe it or not, I think she might miss them!

It isn’t like we bathed her all the time, but she certainly got more than one bath this past summer.  It began when the temperatures started climbing way above the 100-degree mark; even with fans blasting in the chicken coop, there was just no way to really keep her cool!  And a hot chicken is a very sad sight!  So I started bringing her in during the hot part of the day and putting her in a dog crate in the craft room.  Once it the temperature started cooling down, she would go back outside.

“She stinks to high heaven!” my husband declared.

“She does not stink!” I countered.  “She just smells…different.”

“She needs a bath!”  He wasn’t backing down.

After seeing how wild the dogs can be when Robert bathes them, I wasn’t quite sure how Opal Chicken would take to this.  But time after time, she would just sit calmly in the tub, letting Robert suds her up:

He would  take her out and sit her on top of something, and then pour clean water to rinse her off:

The only part she didn’t enjoy was the indignity of Cookie doing some sort of inspection:

But after that was over, now all clean and sweet (and cool!), Opal Chicken could strut around and enjoy her day: