There is a Tractor Supply Co in Fairview Park, Ohio, next to the Ace Hardware and across from El Rodeo Mexican restaurant. This would be fine save Fairview Park is a Cleveland suburb as firmly not rural. It is mostly known for looking the same as the four other suburbs that surrond it save Fairview Park has the "good" Target and an ongoing saga over the defunct community pool. Both liner and roof of the indoor pool have leaks and finger pointing has been furious.
The store has to cater to weekend yard warriors. The kind of guys and ladies that rake every leaf of the yard and need all the toys. This TSC also has the rural trapping of selling live baby chick's. Doubr Fairview has zoning that allows chickens. Neighboring Cleveland allows them but your dream coop is behind red tape and clemency of city hall. Further west you do get "cities" that, 15 years ago, were fields so maybe people truck in from North Ridgeville to get chucks to have them run around the ample acreage out in Lorain County.
The chicks make for quick win with kids, especially when they were younger. It is the mall pet store from our youth where you could lose time seeing actual puppies in windows and tropical fish on neon blue gravel. The kids would glee and ask to keep one and we would tell them just how impractical it all is.
I had pet chickens growing up. Around Easter the local supermarket back home in Rio Piedras would sell dyed baby chicks. We would walk in and to the left was makeshift wire pen (like a baby corral. It likely was some general managers baby corral) with thrown pine hamster bedding, straw and corn. Then dozens of baby chicks in pink, slime green and electric blue. Reading this now it all must sound horrific (and indeed it was wrong and fucked up but it wad Puerto Rico, a godless country where peiope would sell dogs under highway overpasses) but to me it was firmly enchanting and bucolic.
My mother bought me two! A green and blue one we let run around our backyard. This was a time after my mom's old dog, Punky, had passed but before she got me my first dog so the birds were free to rumble around the yard, picking at insects and the mangoes fallen from the neighbor's tree.
They molted away the neone and turned the normal earth tons of the average chickens. One was a rooster and I don't remember it crowing but it was also Puerto Rico where it was standard to see someone ride on horse down a highway.
They were sort of just there until one day they were not.
"They died of blindess," is what my mother said. I took this as absolute fact. The timig coincided with a visit from my grandmother who, according to my mother, "loved me in her own way." Note that I know tell my children this same platitude of my mother to them. But, my grandmother was firmly old school Puerto Rico, grown up in a time when the divide between urban and rural could be measured in decades.
I never saw bodies or a grave. They were just gone and my grandmother back on her way three hours away to the west coast. Did she take them in a cage on "la Linea?" La Linea was an informal bus network made of large vans that plodded between towns. Like an island wide taxi on a set route. I guarantee live poultry has moved along these vans but did my grandmother do that? Or did she butcher them and take them fresh frozen? My grandmother once said she tried to quiet a neighbor's dog by throwing hunks of beef laced with pellet rat poison and she carried a can on bug spray on walks to dissuade neighbor hood strays. I could see her thick hands do the deed of wringing their necks and turning them into a stew.
I believed the blindness lie well into adulthood until someone pointed out "How could a chicken die of blindess?" In my personal dictionary that is the memory associated with epiphany.
