My mother has a friend who has this thing about guinea hens. We don't know why, but she's always had this sort of fascination with them. She and Mom are in quilt guild together. Mom did a "round robin" quilt thing once, where people sign up and pass around boxes with directions for what kind of quilt square they want, and everyone makes a square for them in turn. So you end up with a bunch of squares, each made by somebody in the round-robin group, that you can put together into a quilt. Mom asked for birds, and the friend gave her one with a folk-art guinea hen (this matters at the end of the story).
One day, she invited Mom over to see her "new pets." You guessed it--three guinea chicks. She had them set up in her bathroom in a Rubbermaid bin, under a heat lamp.
She kept them in the bathroom for awhile, but of course they grew and started to get too big for the bin. Then, they started getting out of the bin and making a big bird-mess in the bathroom whenever she left them alone.
One day, she was late leaving work and was trying to get home as fast as possible, knowing that the guineas would have destroyed the bathroom in the meantime and dreading the mess she'd have to clean up. When she opened the bathroom door--sure enough, the guineas had gotten out of the bin and there was bird poop everywhere.
Worse, one of them had fallen in the toilet and drowned.
She gave the two survivors to her sister, who lives in a semi-rural area and has room for chickens.
Mom took the guinea-hen quilt square, cut the guinea out of it, and appliquéd it onto a toilet-seat cover to give her in memory of her bird experiment.
One day, she invited Mom over to see her "new pets." You guessed it--three guinea chicks. She had them set up in her bathroom in a Rubbermaid bin, under a heat lamp.
She kept them in the bathroom for awhile, but of course they grew and started to get too big for the bin. Then, they started getting out of the bin and making a big bird-mess in the bathroom whenever she left them alone.
One day, she was late leaving work and was trying to get home as fast as possible, knowing that the guineas would have destroyed the bathroom in the meantime and dreading the mess she'd have to clean up. When she opened the bathroom door--sure enough, the guineas had gotten out of the bin and there was bird poop everywhere.
Worse, one of them had fallen in the toilet and drowned.
She gave the two survivors to her sister, who lives in a semi-rural area and has room for chickens.
Mom took the guinea-hen quilt square, cut the guinea out of it, and appliquéd it onto a toilet-seat cover to give her in memory of her bird experiment.
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