I don't remember my mother. At all. My father tells me I'm just suppressing things. He says, "sure you do, she's your mother. You spent the first three years of your life with her." I want to say to him, "I'm 15, I spent the last 12 years of my life away from her," but sometimes I think he is sure she just stepped out for milk or chicken feed and she'll be back any minute.

My mother raised chickens. I have a black and white picture of her holding a white rock rooster with a lopped-over red comb. I know from reading about chickens that the comb on a rooster is supposed to stand straight up, bold and bossy. There are "fairest fowl" competitions held all over the country - beauty pageants for poultry - and any rooster looking like the one my mother is holding would be disqualified in the first round. On the back of the photo it says, "Me and My Baby - 1985." I think, "I was born in 1985." But there are no pictures of my mother and me with cutesy little captions on the back. There are no pictures of my mother and me, period.

I have been reading about chickens for as far back as I can remember. I don't know that I even like chickens - I really don't remember them actually running around - but there have always been chicken books piled around the house. Eventually I have made my way through every one of them. My father never throws books away, but he never reads them either. "Those are your mother's," he used to say, as if he thought any day she would turn up in the big overstuffed char, the ugly brown and orange afghan fraying around her, reading about chickens.

A lot of the books are scientific, some with pictures of the 21-day cycle of an egg's development. Some tell all about humidity levels and thermometers, when to turn the eggs, and when not to. "On the last day," one book says, "the chick pips out of the shell with its 'egg tooth.' It makes a little jagged circular cut, completely around the pointy end of the egg. It saws away like a tiny logger, but from the inside out." In the picture the newborn chick looks matted and half-dead. My father says that the first time I saw a chick hatch I started crying and screamed, "Make it go back! Make it go back!" He said its resemblance to a lizard was too much for me. Of course, I don't remember this.

I don't even remember having chickens because after my mother went away, so did they. And like the books he never reads, my father lets the feeders and watering cans adorn the yard like skeletons. When I was little I had tea parties with them, using feeders as pots for mud stew and watering cans for dandelion soup, sitting my dolls around them, dressed in their frilly best. As I got older, though, I was embarrassed when friends would drop by and make jokes. All winter I could forget they were there, playing hide-and-seek under the snow until the spring found them again. Clumps of rusty metal are what bloomed in our yard, while the neighbors had tulips and crocuses. My father never mentions them, but once I got a wild hair to clean the place up and I put them all in a box in the garage. The next day, they were back in the yard, scattered haphazardly, the place looking like a junk yard again. My father never said a word about it. Just like he never mentions my mother, except in reference to chickens.

"She had this one with a mangled foot," he'd say, suddenly animated, "had a name for it. Mangly or something. Its toes were all splayed out like a fan. She used to massage its leathery feet with almond oil." He looks at me for second and raises one eyebrow, then continues, "That chicken was worthless. Didn't lay. Roosters were scared of it. Never knew what she saw in it, but she wouldn't get rid of it."

"And then there were the three Goldies" (by now I'm sure he doesn't even know I'm in the room), "Goldie Hawn, Goldie Rose and Goldie Meyer. Great egg layers, but they had some kind of molting problem. Bald, they were, all three of them. And still she lugged them everywhere in that old red wagon - to the store, out to the post office, even tried to take them into the beauty parlor once when she had to get her hair done. She just hugged and kissed them like they were her very own babies." I cringe at this point in the story, part of me wanting to scream, "I WAS HER BABY! I WAS HER BABY!" Of course, I don't and he doesn't look at me anyway, just launches back into his reverie.

"When the mink finally got them - bit their heads off and just left the rest of them lying there - she moped for days. The graves are still mounded up out back, clumps of lilies blooming on them as if they'd been flesh and blood relatives." I don't tell him that I found those graves years ago and the lilies I put into coke bottles every summer are those very ones, my one attempt at trying to bring something bright and alive into our house.

I watch my father when he talks about the chickens. He limps to the coffee pot and fills his cup. His hands are rough and calloused, scarred from years of working in the woods, falling and scaling trees, lugging chainsaws and bucking up logs. He's scarred inside, too, in ways I will never know except that when he isn't talking about my mother's hens, he is sullen and withdrawn. He reminds me, a little, of the off-kilter chickens he speaks of. While he talks, he stirs his coffee absentmindedly, and looks out at the feeders and watering cans. I imagine the ghost chickens he might be seeing, scratching the ground for spaghetti worms, eating the potato bug soup left over from my childish tea parties.

I don't ask him where my mother went; I don't know if he would tell me if he knew. I don't ask if he loved her, or if he thought she loved him. I especially don't ask if she loved me. And I don't tell him, either, that under my mattress I keep a poem from my mother. I found it scribbled in thin black ink in "A Guide to Raising Chickens." I tore it out of the book, and though it's rumpled with age, I can still read the words, still read the page number, 194. I notice it's from the chapter about incubation and the poem is written underneath a paragraph that says "eliminate eggs that are round, oblong, or otherwise oddly shaped, and those with shells that are wrinkled, glassy, or abnormal in any other way."

I've had the poem for almost two years now and I keep it almost as much for the way it looks as for what it says. In my mother's wobbly scritch of handwriting it reads:

The Hatching
In the dark of night
I illuminate the porous shell
of my incubated eggs with a flashlight
searching for a heartbeat
a web of blood vessels
muted peeping.
Something, anything
that will give me hope.
I cup the warm, pulsing egg
in both hands, praying for life,
knowing it is really me
wanting to bust out of that shell.

Sometimes when I fall asleep after reading the poem, I will have this one recurring dream. It starts out like a nightmare, where I'm trapped inside an egg and I'm trying to saw my way out with a butter knife. My knees are up against my chin; I'm sweating. My hair is matting on my forehead. Slowly, slowly, I work my way out of the egg. I bust through the splintering shell and I cut myself on the greenish shards. Blood seeps from my cuts and I notice fuzzy yellow down appearing all over my skin. I'm slowly growing fuzz and in the dream it feels real. Suddenly my mother - the same woman from the photo with the rooster - is picking me up and holding me close to her cheek. I'm her baby chick and she's telling me that I'm beautiful; that she loves me and that I am the only who didn't come out looking like a lizard.