The case of the missing rooster

Yesterday afternoon we had a knock on our door.  Someone had seen the huge sign we put up at the mailbox stating that the rooster statue was stolen and we were offering a reward for it.  She said that she saw a rooster in front of a house over the weekend in the next county over.  She told me she'd never seen it before and when she saw our sign just then, she'd made a u-turn to come back and tell me.  

She gave me directions on how to get to it and we got in the car and off we went.  I kept telling the boys it wasn't going to be our rooster.  I didn't think anyone would be dumb enough to put the rooster out in front of their house, less than half an hour away.

Not our rooster

Sure enough, it wasn't our rooster.

We came home.

Today I got a message from someone on Facebook saying her friend saw a rooster that had to have been ours.  I replied and told her that the one on "Green Road" isn't ours, and she told me that was the one that she had seen.

I'm thankful that people are looking for it and noticing things and trying to help.  I just with the thieves had it somewhere to be spotted.  I believe that whoever took the rooster have it tucked back in the woods on their own property, perhaps as a funny target for shooting at, and it will never be seen again.

And that got me thinking about the path our rooster has taken with us.

Awhile back, a good friend of mine shared this blog post with me from The Bloggess.  I laughed out loud.  Several times.  I just knew that when I purchased my house, I had to get a rooster too.  A few months later when I finally did buy my house, I started looking for my own rooster, and that good friend was also trying to find me one too.

Finally, after searching for about six months, I found my own rooster.

When we got him home, I bought spray paint to repaint him just so the colors would stand out a little more, and then we propped him up by the mailbox and chained him down so no one would take him.

Sure enough, a few months later we found him laying on the ground.  Someone had moved the boulders and tried to take him but stopped when they saw he was chained down.

For Christmas I thought it would be funny to start painting him for the different holidays.  We started with red and green.

 And then we added a strand of Christmas lights.

I had been hoping to paint it red, white, and pink with hearts for Valentine's Day but didn't have the paint or the time.

For Easter I knew we would do an Easter Egg, but the vision in my mind was much better than what my artistic abilities could create.

And then for the summer we painted him red, white, and blue and I even got smart and created a stencil to put some stars on him.

The plan was to paint him orange like a pumpkin at the start of October and I hadn't decided how to paint him between now and then.  He was stolen before I came up with any ideas.

Now that I've seen how the community liked him and liked watching him change, I'm determined to replace him and paint him more often.  It still won't look great as painting a metal rooster with spray paint isn't easy to do, but now that I've gotten smarter and I can make stencils, I think I can come up with some ideas.

This post was shared on Thursdays @ the Homestead Blog Hop