The second strange summer of the pandemic, it was the evenings I longed to avoid. The softening of the day’s sounds, a change in the song of the birds, the light gone sleepy, and the awakening of the ever-shorter night. Florentino had been with me for nearly a year, one full of pandemic loss and gain, and now he was gone leaving an imprint upon my heart and home.
Florentino provided a rhythm to the days bound by the daily journey of first light until the pink gray evening duskiness. He’d retire into his little house with the emergence of evening, the light summer rain, or the Oregon coastal range fog sneaking through the verdant moss, cedars and pines. On days I went away to work, I rushed, hurried, raced the sun’s departure home to tuck him in, stroke his back feathers, touch his vibrant comb with a kiss. He was my friend. We lived by a tempo, something like an ancient agreement we could only sense, beyond our reach and understanding.
Maybe it was my perpetual solitude most days that held a hint of loneliness under its many gifts or maybe it was the sinking feeling that the pandemic foretold of earthly troubles to come. Regardless, my love for a bird with vibrant feathers and red eyes consumed my daily routine.
But I get ahead of myself. It began just before the pandemic emerged. One day a barred rock rooster showed up in the community park just down the hill from my house. He must have been dropped off by someone in mid-January of 2020. He was a regal creature, standing in the pouring rain, certainly no beggar, under the tree by the soccer field or seeking shelter in the woods across the street. I never paid attention to roosters before, but he was such a novelty, and so unusual, that I had to take a walk and check on him daily.
The park rooster was clever enough to avoid vehicles and cross the street cautiously. Timber trucks stopped for him. People from the neighborhood brought food to him. Something about him piqued my interest. Maybe it was the resilient and stoic mastering of his abandonment, or the scrappy survivalist manner that kept him alive. I clearly remember him under a maple tree in the rain, perched on one leg. Tree pose, how appropriate.
He lived in the park about two months or so before he disappeared. I remember exactly. It was 12:30 pm on a weekday. I heard his crow, loud and surprised and different from most days. I looked up from my computer and sensed he was gone. No one seemed to know exactly what happened. The Park and Rec guys said they heard he’d been taken to a farm outside of town. Just as when he arrived, his departure was a mystery. His gallant call through the bramble of the creek behind my house, the holler up the hills, echoing his daily greetings suddenly stopped and it left a clear and apparent void within me. I decided I needed my own rooster, one that would not disappear, to fill that empty spot. In late March, I set out to find him.
I searched for my rooster through a series of dating app-like episodes, not wanting to settle for the squat, the older, the infirm, the broken, the dysfunctional. I responded to Facebook offers for free roosters, but they weren’t my type. Then in April 2020, a message came from a friend of a friend. A cockerel just born on a farm, not so far from me, a unique breed called the Whiting True Blue and I could have him when he reached 12 weeks old.
I knew when I saw him that he was Florentino Ariza, like his Love in the Time of Cholera namesake, he was full of himself and proud from his first days, despite his humble birth. I went out to see him a few times before he was old enough to leave. I could hold his tiny body in the palm of my hands. He had his own mind from the beginning, pecking seeds out of my palm and cocking his little head looking for more. I brought him home in a cardboard box filled with sawdust and chicken scratch, talking with him the entire way. I didn’t really know much about roosters. So, I bought books and googled information on raising chickens. I intentionally do not have any pets since my old cat passed on three years ago. The addition of a little cockerel into my days was a new commitment.
He started out in a big dog cage I purchased for him from the feed store. I kept it in my kitchen, with diapers lining the bottom and a scattering of pine shavings. He drank his water and ate from cat bowls filled with unmedicated baby chicken feed. I let him roam around my house, even sit at my dinner table with me. This was a challenge for housekeeping, and I continually mopped up after him. I researched how to potty train chickens, but this seemed unlikely. He sat on the back of the old green wooden kitchen chair and watched me work or eat meals. I covered the cage at night with a blanket. Of course, he hadn’t learned to crow yet.
He was an indoor-outdoor rooster at first. I’d take him outside and he’d hang out in the giant rhododendron for hours just taking in the situation. A friend’s daughter told me about diapers you could buy for chickens on Amazon. I considered it for a minute. It never came to that though, because another friend gifted me with a gorgeous chicken coop, a perfect piece of real estate, two stories with privacy and a screened-in porch. Florentino knew it was his home almost immediately. Under the large pine, he resided with boughs of cozy green above his house at night and the ability to roam freely during the day. At first, he stayed in the rhododendron bushes hiding from and sizing up potential predators. As he got older, he free-ranged about the neighborhood making friends with cats and deer, avoiding the raccoon and dogs.
He found his voice one mid to late summer afternoon. His first crow caught him by surprise while scolding a pesky feline visitor, but soon he caught on and nature instructed him in a new routine. With first light, his haunting call began, an echo through the hills behind me. Like a sentry waking from his perch, he’d journey the short walk down the plank from the second floor of his coop to the cool grass below. Alighting his upturned ceramic water jug podium, he’d take the pulpit and begin the new day. Throwing back his head, yellow beak open, his red eyes proud; he had no hesitancy or shame. Calling into the open air, not looking for a response—but stating his presence boldly.
As fall turned to winter, I continued out every morning at a respectable hour for neighborhood activity, opening the door of his coop. Me in my red boots slogging out to the coop each morning to feed him and let him out. My hair a consistent mess, eyes puffy, still in my jams and a sweatshirt, freeing him to the morning. No matter the weather or time of year, Florentino always went to the neighbors with children first. He was a peeping tom, always looking into windows, mine included. Mid afternoon tea time, I could count on Florentino watching me work while stationed on the back of the porch chair closest to the window.
In the winter, I reinforced the outside of the coop with cinder blocks, bricks and stones to fortress him from critters who sought an evening meal of his food while he snoozed, or worse, to have him for a meal. By that time in the pandemic, things were somewhat open again and I was going to my work office again thirty some miles away. I hurried back home before dark to close and latch the coop door in order to keep him safe and predators at bay. He’d look at me with disdain when I ran late, rushing through the descending evening, tripping along the rock path to reach the door of his little house and securing it before nightfall.
Florentino was never too keen on being held and cuddled. I had difficulty catching him when he was young and when I did, he only accepted my attention for a short while. But on New Year’s Day 2021, like a belated Christmas present, he started letting me hold him again, like when he was very small. As if he knew that I needed his company and comfort as much as he needed me, he became a bird who gives hugs. He started dancing at this time too. It was funny at first, his golden talons tapping across the sidewalk toward me when I’d drive into the driveway. The look on his face I could swear was a smile, yes, he smiled quite often. I think he laughed too.
He was a big bird by March, and it took both arms to hold him, but still he tolerated the attention and hugs. He knew his name and came running when I called him. His feathers grew varied into numerous and unique patterns of grays, blacks, browns, and white. His comb grew like a brilliant barn red crown and the wattle followed suit. I told him he was beautiful often, so that like a child he would grow to believe it. Once he believed it, which didn’t take long, nothing could convince him otherwise.
He seemed to like everyone until spring, and then he changed. By mid-April, Florentino had turned from jovial gatekeeper and neighborhood spy to vigilante guard of my house. Threatening the UPS driver, neighbors, postal workers and kind women walking down the street; he became unruly. Although he still rushed to greet my car when I returned and let me hold him, he made much more of a fuss. He attacked my neighbor while she was watching him one weekend. Sneaking up behind her feathers unfurled, he lunged at her back side. He attacked my friends and family members in this same manner. People in the neighborhood went from adoring him to complaining. It became clear to me that one day he might be hit by a car intentionally or disappear.
It’s a fickle world we live in, and Florentino’s neighborhood entertainment and pandemic diversion altered into the increased rumblings of diesel pick-ups and impatience. Folks who raise chickens told me that this new behavior was common. Roosters were naturally aggressive and not usually pets. I had difficulty accepting this information, but it became apparent that it was time for him to live elsewhere.
I booked Florentino a ride with an animal courier traveling from Seattle to Santa Barbara. Florentino could live in Sacramento with my son, who had a big backyard and chickens but no rooster. I grieved my choice almost immediately, knowing that six hundred forty-five miles away he would forget me, take on the visage of regular poultry, and not have the freedom to which he was accustomed. Plus, it’s much warmer there. Florentino left Oregon in late April, almost a year after he came to live with me.
There are things that are easier now: the lack of chicken poop droppings on my front porch, the hole in the screen door not getting any larger from his pecking like a knock to get my attention, and the resumption of my mail and UPS deliveries to the porch. But in all honesty, there is more that I miss. His face, which to the untrained eye always looked the same, actually had numerous expressions and what appeared to be emotions. Regardless of what anyone says about the rooster brain, I found some emotional intelligence in his primitive demeanor. He always seemed enthusiastic to see me, perhaps anthropomorphism on my part, but this happiness was shared.
“He’s definitely better off now,” my favorite neighbor, Lori, said. “He’ll get to spend time with other chickens and that’s going to be good for him. He was getting too aggressive and he had to go.” While courteous to my grief, I knew she did not share my sadness.
I’m not known to be a crying type of gal, but I cried for days after he left. I usually stay clear from too much emotion, mine that is. I close my eyes and find ways to dampen down joy, as well as keep monsters at bay. A trick to avoid disappointment at best. I shut the door on anything that gives my heart pain as if to open it a crack would blow back a tornado, unhinging the door from the casings and sending all of the carefully tidied contents it protects whirling into oblivion, never to be set right again. An old habit, I fine-tuned years ago. But this is not how presence works. These tears I cried were an outpouring of suppressed salty waterways opening the gates of my heart and breaking the spell. Or maybe I just wanted him home again.
I still want to holler his name and see him come running to me across the neighbor’s yards or from his dirt bath spot under the big pine tree. I want to hold his soft feathers next to my heart, touch the top of his head, whisper his name, talk about how pretty he is and have him delight in the attention of being the cock of the yard. Florentino: proud, fierce and loyal. Who says roosters can’t love people?
I went to see him in Sacramento this summer. He had changed, as I knew he would. My two-year old grandson, William, took my hand and led me back to the much smaller, less attractive confinement holding the rooster. “Bobitino,” William said pointing. Florentino recognized me and started his tap dance toward me, as a slight memory seemed to take hold. He allowed me to hold him reluctantly but started to fight my attention almost immediately. He had to be separated from the chickens because he attacked his own chicks. I guess this is common but seemed quite barbaric for my once sweet rooster.
Florentino wasn’t unhappy, but he didn’t seem so free or unusual anymore. He was turning into what the world thinks of roosters. Not a magical dancing bird who smiles and laughs, but a common chicken in a small drab coop in a dusty, dry and colorless California backyard. Had my rooster complied with his genetics at last or would he always hold the spark of sentience?
I still haven’t cleaned or moved his coop. It’s a vacant house someone has left and all that remains is the sad reminder of a place that was once a home. I avoided my back deck all summer without him to share it. He loved sitting in the wicker chairs. The morning air is empty of his wake-up call these days, but I’m growing used to that too. That morning crow, a link to the creatures of earth, rhythms like tides that run through us unnoticed in our human world. Something in me woke up. A dormant longing to experience life more fully, not just lists and routines, but breath and air and feeling.
The pandemic brought me closer to earth and nature and its spirits that inhabit those places we ignore, so beautiful and close, however unseen. It was quieter, simpler for a minute. There was time to read a book and take daily walks. There was time to delight in the sound of a rooster.
and is concerned about the environment
and the fate of humanity. She works as a servant of
social good by day. She is co-author of
Singing with the Sirens, published in 2015.
- Florentino - March 7, 2022