Chickens

The large stump of an old tree that had been cut the winter past was sitting outside the kitchen patio. The kitchen was hot with the heat coming from boiling pots of water on the stove. The chopping began outside and the work began in the kitchen. The first chickens my father had butchered were brought in to be boiled so the feathers could be plucked out. I sat at the kitchen table with Lisa plucking all of the feathers off the hot slippery chickens. Lisa complained at each new chicken set on the table for us to “work on”. At first I enjoyed the task, but the fun quickly wore out and I longed to be outside where my dad and Scott were butchering.
My mom and dad didn’t want to butcher the chickens, but the man we rented the farm from said we had to. He wanted to raise his own chickens in the chicken coops. Chicken after chicken were prepared and bagged and put in the huge, white, deep freeze to keep. A few times I was allowed to take a break from the hot and tedious work and go outside to watch my father butcher. Trying to put some humor into this not so humorous work, my dad would chop the head off a chicken and let it go. John and I chased it around the yard as fast as we could, my father laughing as we scrambled to try and catch it. Chickens run pretty fast when they don’t have heads on and they go in all kinds of directions because they don’t have eyes any more to see where they are going.
I was going to miss having chickens. I would miss the chicks in the spring. I would miss going out every morning and collecting the eggs from the nests and putting them in cartons to sell to the store. I even would miss going to feed the chickens. My mother laughed at me almost every day as we walked up to the chicken coop, grain buckets in hand, white, buckled sandals on my feet. The minute we opened the gate they would attack my little toes thinking they were food to eat. I’d screech and prance about trying to keep them from pecking, spilling the grain on the ground as I did my little dance around the pen.
I’m sure my parents missed the money they got from selling the eggs. But we ate a lot of chicken for years. After that butchering day, Lisa never ate chicken again. She says that it has nothing to do with the butchering, but the rest of my family disagrees. The man that owned the farm never did raise his own chickens. From then on the chicken coop lay empty. This infuriated my parents and it wasn’t long before they made plans to move out of that rental house on the farm.