Mother Hen hates gossip. Really she does – especially when it’s about her!
So when Gwennie Hennie told Chipper Chicken that Henny Penny said Barbie Birdie criticized Mother Hen’s nestkeeping, it was game on, girls!
How was MH to maintain her stellar reputation if other chickies spread malicious caca (not just caca, mind you, but malicious caca!) around the pen? How could she keep her lily-white feathers unbesmirched when nasty rumors are floating around like fluff in the breeze?
MH considered getting even, she is pained to admit, but that was unworthy of her famous dignity and self-composure. Besides, if Missy Chick found out she would die of shame, right before she informed all the other chicklets about what her Mama had done. Darn that texting anyway!
No, there was only one solution. Mother Hen organized a yard sale.
Her clearing out the coop project was simply not staying far enough ahead of the chicken wire express, you see. Not that there was any truth to the slanderous scuttlebutt making the rounds, mind you. Not at all! There was just a little excess…clutter to redistribute. What better way to redistribute clutter than to foist it on one’s neighbors!
Junior Rooster was equipped with paint and cardboard to make signs. Missy Chick was entrusted with sticker sticking. Father Rooster agreed to crow an announcement right after he finished gargling for his sore throat. Mother Hen sat back with a hot tea and some popcorn to strategize. Someone had to think up appropriate pricing, or the other lady hens might think that there was only junk for sale.
Finally the momentous day arrived.
The Coop Family made six kernels of corn, two rusty pennies, and a small sheet of tin that Father R. is sure he can use somehow. The coop is covered in paint, sticker backing, leftover buttered popcorn, and a generous beak-full of mouthwash, which FR spewed after Junior asked him what a tampon was. (There was an ad on the back of a cardboard sign.) However, the whole family lost a prodigious amount of weight hauling the “merchandise” outside and back in again.
Mother Hen has a sneaking suspicion the hens are chattering again.
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