From Coop to Cubicles: A Chicken Tender’s Puzzle Journey
by guest blogger, Elmer Prather
My latest puzzle is a 1000-piece puzzle titled Chick Inn by UTURN STUDIOS. I must have a connection to a puzzle before I spend the time to put it together. My connection to this puzzle is the baby chicks standing in a wooden display box. Pictures tell a story, and when I saw this puzzle picture, I was fascinated by the story it would tell. I just fell in love with it. The puzzle picture has a wooden structure with nine sections. Six of the nine sections have a baby chick standing and looking around like it is lost. I know a lot about baby chicks because when I was twelve years old, my mother gave me the responsibility of caring for our flock of free-range chickens. This also meant that I cared for the baby chicks as they hatched and grew up. The chicks in the puzzle seem calm and collected; none of the baby chicks I raised would stand in a section of a box and not run for their lives.
The puzzle is remarkably interesting. It required many different processes coming together to create. The chicks in the box are about a week old, and they have been positioned in seven of the nine cubicles in the wooden display case. There is so much creativity at work in this puzzle that it is difficult to describe it in detail. Each of the baby chicks is standing in the middle of an array of items. Some of these items include eggshells, eggs, flowers, bird nests, straw, strawberries, small chickens made of ceramic. There are eight different types of flowers displayed in the cubicles. It is amazing how many items have been placed in the cubicles displayed in this puzzle.
As I was putting this puzzle together, I remembered how satisfying it was for me to take the mother hen and her newly hatched baby chicks out of the nest, set them on the ground, and watch the mother hen call them to her. She would immediately start to teach them how to scratch the ground for food as she took her new brood across the yard to the watering dish. I remembered that newly hatched chicks were very adaptive and able to fend for themselves in a truly short while.
It was a pleasure to put this puzzle together because of all the memories it brought back to me when I was a twelve-year-old “Chicken Tender”.
Elmer Prather
Canton, GA USA
