When chickens play there's bound to be kicking, and considerable debate about rules. Recently ours found an old baseball in their exercise yard. Perhaps the dog put it there perhaps, who knows what, some lost beaver's ghost? All six chix wandered up going, "Oooooh!" "Would you look at that!" "I was surprised, were you surprised, I was quite surprised." They evaluated from all angles. "Wensleydale, go on, give it a peck." "No, you." "I will if you're...too...chicken..." What a joke! "Chicken! Ha! Chicken!" "Whaaaat?" "Whaaaat!" Soon they were running all over, thoroughly engaged. I couldn't quite make out what sport they were attempting, Quidditch possibly? The essence seemed to be that after you had scuffed the earth, you gave the ball a kick. At one point someone yelled, "Why didn't you cross it? I was wide open." The black one limped off in a huff, gesturing at me as if I were a ref. Settled into a nesting box, she squeezed out her ire, muttered long replays of what should have gone on. Finally with a triumphant shriek, she laid an egg, raised up, got back in the game. Expecting, as one does sometimes, quite illogically I'll grant, that after my long journey my home city might have changed, I returned from a long long drive in the sunny climes of Califor-ni-a to buckets and buckets of dumping rain. If the pathetic fallacy were in play I'd now be in in a terrible mental twist, emotions scattered like limbs torn from a Douglas fir, my heart gusting like the wind, tantrums hissing around the house like cats. Apart from having to clean up the mess left by careless and inaccurate beasts, though a little stiff of back and noting the possibility of a power outage, actually I'm really quite content. If we must get literary, anthropomorphizing like one who has stumbled across a magazine cover offering ten slim new uses for metaphor, I'm as content as an apprentice magic chicken might be after laying an egg. David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html