It happened around 9 years ago, but my heart still hurts every time I remember it.

In the summer of 2009, my father and mother made a bamboo basket padded with straw, preparing for a hen to brood 30 eggs. Generally speaking, it would take 21 days for an egg to be hatched. Every day after school, my brother and I would dash out of the school gate in eagerness in order to feed the hen.About 3 weeks later, the lovely chicks we looked forward to hatched one after another. At that time, one of the greatest pleasures of us was to provide milk and other food to feed the "chicken family". We would observe their funny motion and debate excitedly which one is a rooster and which one is a hen.

Then one day, sorrowfully we found that a chick was drowned in the small pond in our backyard. To avoid such a tragedy, my mother confined the "chicken family" in a plastic shed, which made things even worse. A few days later, a growing number of chicks became weak and then died, but my mother fed the left chicks with wrong medicine at the thought of they having stomach trouble.

Eventually, in a gloomy and windy afternoon, there was only one sick, young white cock left, with its eyes dazed and its body frail. The miserable hen crowed harshly and sadly, pushing the dying chick with her beak, but failed to wake it up.

That afternoon, the hen still called her chicks wherever she found a small insect, but only been replied by the rolling wind. I felt my heart quivering and my eyes full of tears.

From then on, my mother has never kept chicks.