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Tooling along West Wendover the other day, I could have sworn I saw chickens pecking in the grass on the shoulder.

"You weren’t dreaming,” Shirley Morehead Simmons assured me. “You saw chickens on Wendover.”

It was true. There at the city line, 40 to 50 game hens, roosters and speckled chicks roam the backyard of the house where Simmons and her husband, Norman, have lived since 1972, before Party City, before Babies “R” Us.

At first, one or two hens showed up, then a brilliant copper and black rooster or two. Before Simmons knew it, they started doing what chickens do. Making little chickens.

“They don’t lay their eggs in one set place,” she said, peeking underneath a faded ’77 Cadillac, one of their favorite nesting places. “They even lay eggs in the dog house. They go through the woods to Kmart, and people feed them.”

I was thinking about Simmons’ free-range brood the other day, with news that the Greensboro Planning Board had taken up the so-called “urban chicken” question.

The matter came up after a couple in Lindley Park began keeping hens and added a rooster, to the crack-of-dawn dismay of neighbors. The planning board decided last week to recommend that the City Council rewrite the rules on keeping chickens and bees, a subject of increased interest on the part of slow-food types.

“Right now a lot of homeowner groups prohibit it,” said planning board member Joel Landau, “just like they prohibit clotheslines. They think it detracts from the appearance. They may just have to get used to it.”

For Simmons, raising chickens is nothing new. She grew up on her grandfather George H. Morehead’s acreage near Muirs Chapel and Tower Road, and in her youth, it was typical for people to work a day job, then come home and work the vegetable garden or feed the hogs.

“I was a tomboy, and I loved it. I went to school in the city, so you could say I had the best of both worlds,” said Simmons, 62, nodding toward an ambulance that wailed by on Wendover. “Out here, it’s more like three or four worlds.”

When Simmons walks to the backyard with a pie plate full of bread crumbs, the chickens flock to her in a chattering clutch, but they only come so close. These aren’t the tame sort of fowl you give pet names, the way the ecofriendly Lindley Park couple did.

Still, they serve the same purpose: Free eggs.

And though that might seem a revolutionary concept to the citified — people who use words like “sustainability” and “artisanal” — to Simmons, it’s second nature.

“It would not be a disgrace to go back to that, in my thinking,” Simmons said. “Sometimes you get too high and forget where you came from. That’s my theory.”

A hearing on the city’s rules for keeping chickens — and bees — is set for 5:30 p.m. Aug. 19 at City Hall.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com