CHICKENS

For the most part I didn't want to stand out when I was a kid. I wanted to be like the others. I was content with my mom. Her reddish auburn hair, crystal blue eyes and freckled face, was a normal mom’s face. She seemed to be a normal mom’s size and wore normal cotton print dresses she made herself. She moved around our house and town doing all the things I trusted that other mom’s did back in the 1940’s.

           I accepted it all until I advanced to the point of having a real life, which occurred when I started school. Then I began comparing. So when I think about chickens, I think of the first time I realized my mom, the most important person in my life, was different. She had chickens. She had crates full of tiny fluffy yellow chirping things living in our kitchen by the stove. She ordered them from a catalogue when raising them from eggs didn’t work well. The chicks stayed there, in between our stove and cupboard, until they were old enough to be transferred to an outdoor pen where a string of light bulbs kept them warm. Eventually the chicks grew and turned into chickens, like real clucking, scratching, running around in a circle, pecking chickens.

            To me, chickens seemed to be something normal for a mother to have.  The fact that my mother’s chicken coup was the only one for miles never occurred to me. I thought waking up each morning to the crowing of our rooster was the same experience all kids had. I didn’t know until years later that my mother’s rooster was reported to the local sheriff as a neighborhood disturbance.

            I first realized it might be unusual to have a mini farm in my back yard when I met Judith Carson at kindergarten and asked her over to play (play “dates” didn’t exist. It was plain “playing”, not "dates" back then.)

            When Judith visited, my mom, the one with the auburn hair, blue eyes and freckles, fixed us milk and cookies. She always baked cookies from scratch. (That was another thing she did that I thought was ordinary.) Over the first bites of cookies Judith explained her cookies were perfectly round with icing in the middle. They were not like the one’s my mom made that were various oval shapes with raisins and crunchy oatmeal.  She explained that her mom didn’t bake cookies, but bought theirs at the grocery store. I didn’t know you could buy cookies already made.

            After the snack we went outdoors into my large yard to play. My mom asked if we wanted to feed the chickens.

            “What?” says Judith. “Chickens? Like real live chickens?” She was interested and excited.

            “Sure, ours are over here in the corner inside the special fence.” I said with a smile, glad and surprised she thought it would be fun to meet a live chicken. Didn’t everyone know chickens?

            Handing her a bowl full of seeds, crumbs and fresh veggie trimmings, I was confident we were alike even if we ate different kinds of cookies.

            My mom explained the feeding process to my new friend. At first the small group of fast moving, clucking and scratching feathered creatures frightened Judith but soon she got the idea and scattered the food like I did. Over the next weeks she visited often helping us gather eggs from inside the small wire coup. She learned what I’d always assumed everyone knew, that the chickens laid the eggs in little batches of hay and they were usually warm to the touch. Judith explained her eggs were cold, came in a carton, and from the same store that provided the cookies.

            Judith didn’t come over when it came time for a fine chicken dinner and looking back it was probably a good thing. My mom went to the coup and picked out the fattest specimens. She chased and caught them. She grabbed each by the neck and whirling it around in the air its neck would break. Then she hung them by the legs on a wire line. Slice! Quick as could be, the head was cut off with a large sharp knife and blood dripped onto the grass. The chickens continued to jerk around, until they didn’t.

            While the chicken hung, my mom melted paraffin wax in a large pot and I watched the real work begin. She let me help pluck or pull most of the feathers out of the chickens, putting the non-bloody ones into a big cloth bag. Later she washed them and used the feathers to stuff pillows. The remaining feathers, the ones that wouldn’t come out easily, were doused with the hot paraffin making the removal of every last tiny feather possible. Imagine dripping a candle on to a pile of feathers and letting it dry into a clump. That will give you the picture.

            In the end my mom’s chickens looked the same as Judith’s mom’s butcher store bought chickens but I didn’t know that until I visited her house.  I discovered her mom had black hair all done up in beauty-shop curls, with brown-mascaraed eyes and no freckles. They had flowerbeds in their yard, no vegetable garden and no chicken coup.

            It was then I knew there was a big difference in Judith’s family and mine. Not only did they have packages of Oreo cookies and beautiful white Wonder Bread, but her mom unwrapped a bundle of brown paper exposing a perfectly featherless, bald chicken with no wrung neck, no blood and no head.

            Questions popped in my mind, “Why didn’t my family have butcher-bought chickens? Why didn’t we have store bought cookies? Was my mother, the one with the auburn hair and freckles and a coup full of chickens, weird? Was my family as good as hers?”

            It was many years later before I truly appreciated and was proud of my mom's weirdness. She was a country girl that eventually turned into a city lady.  She recycled before it became the thing to do. She began with chickens and home churned butter and a fresh vegetable garden. She ended with a master’s degree in education being recognized as a leader in her field. I suspect one of the reasons she was such a great teacher was because she had first hand experience baking cookies and raising her own chickens.