A few days before Christmas, I accidentally locked myself in the neighbor’s chicken coop. Believe me, I know how funny this sounds. I know it is a tale rife with metaphor. And I know I will not soon live it down. But trust me when I say there is more than hilarity and allegory when you are the one in the coop.

The day of the fateful lock-in, the morning bloomed bright and breathtakingly cold. The walk down our steep driveway and up to the neighbor’s backyard coop would take a few minutes. Because the temperature was in the single digits, I carried multiple containers of hot water to thaw out the chickens’ drinking source.

I had a lot on my mind. For one, I was worried about the chickens freezing to death while their owners were out of town. For another, I was worried about falling. I had fallen the previous week while getting a tour of the coop, bludgeoning my left kneecap on the razor edge of a slate step. Days later, my knee was still the size of a navel orange, and painful. I certainly didn’t want to fall again.

“Be careful!” my husband had said to me (cheerfully, warmly, from his little cave of joy, also known as our heated garage, where he was priming a sheet of aluminum to paint on and listening to a podcast by a famous art critic).

“I will,” I said. And until I locked myself in the coop, it hadn’t occurred to me it was on a roster of things to do that would be considered careless.

I don’t know about your brain, but the instant mine realizes I’ve done something that could have dire repercussions, it tries to flee. It does this by way of distraction. Upon hearing the sickening click of the lock on the unreachable outside of the coop, my brain said not, “Ut oh, this is bad,” or “Oh shoot, how am I going to get out of this six-foot by eight-foot enclosure that is also occupied by eleven slightly alarmed chickens and more excrement than I have seen in a lifetime of owning dogs?”

No, upon realizing I was locked inside a chicken coop in five-degree weather behind a house in which there were no occupants, my brain said, “Welp! Time to change the water out!” in the same tone I use to say to my husband, every night at 5 p.m., “Welp! Time to open the wine!”

Only after I’d swapped the frozen water for the water I’d brought with me did the reality of my predicament set in. The coop had no escape route besides the door. I could heave myself against the wire walls and possibly create a tear in them, but admittedly I’m not that strong, and it would probably have just inflamed the chickens. Under my sixteen layers of clothes I began to anxious-sweat gigantic beads of ice. Standing there in the glacial morning air, with my throbbing globe-knee and my rapidly declining body temperature, I wondered: Was this how I was going to die?

As I saw it, I had two lifelines, only one of which could actually save my life. I could call my husband, but he would never hear his phone. I knew this because I’d seen it lying unhelpfully on the kitchen counter—far from where he toiled in the garage priming aluminum and learning critical things about art from his podcast—when I left for chicken duty. Or I could call the chicken owners, and disrupt their peaceful holiday reverie with tales of my imminent death.

I called my husband. I called and called, and then I called and called some more. By the eleventh unanswered call, a rage so hot burned in my veins I briefly considered undressing, and a vile fantasy bloomed in my head in which I (having been miraculously released from the coop) stormed the garage and stabbed my husband repeatedly, probably with an icicle I broke off from the roof. I thought about how the word “wife” had always reminded me of the word “life,” as in a sentence that is handed down, and how clear it was now why the two words had always been conflated in my mind.    

Then I texted the chicken-owning neighbors and explained my plight. They texted back immediately. They said they were so sorry. They said there was a wire pull cord inside the coop door that would lift the outside latch. An abiding love blossomed in my chest for them, in exact proportion to the boiling animosity I had for my husband. Until, that is, I pulled the wire and it broke.

This, my friends, is when I understood that this would not be a funny story to tell later. It would not become a finely (if obviously) observed metaphor about feelings of entrapment and how we imprison ourselves and ultimately set ourselves free. It was not a symbolic wrap-up of the past few years (during which I sometimes, owing to Covid, not to mention the whole “wife/life” thing, felt cooped up), nor was it a harbinger of what the new year had in store for me. This was the literal end of my life, and it was not in the least bit poetic.

And then chicken-owning neighbors texted the other neighbors—the ones so close by I could have, had I not been busy with my own theoretical death, simply yelled to for help. They sauntered right over and let me out. I’ll admit, it was practically a disappointment.