Chickens

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Chickens. 

Chickens. That may seem a strange topic for a blog, but I relish it. Chickens have been and continue to be an important part of my life. Yet what really brought this topic to my mind was a recent surprise. Jane and were having dinner (steak) at a friend’s home. At the back yard of her suburban home I spied a chicken, “Oh yes, “she said, “that is Rosie my wonderful friend.” Subsequent conversation revealed that Rosie was a friend, someone to be looked after, taken into the house at night, prepared for bed and made comfortable so it could have a good night’s sleep. That was a new way of looking at a chicken.

I grew up with lots of chickens outside that rural teacherage in Walburg Texas. We raised chickens to provide us with the eggs we ate some 365 days a year. It was the chickens that my mother fried for us accompanied by mashed potatoes and cream gravy that delighted my soul and sustained my body through years of the Great Depression. Mother would go out, grab a chicken, cut its head off with a small hatchet, pluck its feathers, cut it up, cover it with flour and then deep-fry it in lard. My dream of heaven is that God uses that recipe for dinner in heaven.

Chickens also meant a lot of work, much of it messy. As winter came to an end I was assigned the task of cleaning out the little shed where we had stored the wood for the fire that kept us warm when a “norther” blew in. Then dad would go somewhere and bring back 100 or so tiny day-old newly hatched baby chickens. They needed to be kept secure from coyotes and hawks, fed daily and assured enough water. When they were old enough they joined the rest of their family in the big chicken house next to the barn. There they laid their eggs, served as a source of entre for many meals, sometimes hatched their ancestors and always made a mess. It was a part of my assignment from as early as I can remember to scoop up that mess and keep the place reasonably clean. This took on immense proportions when as an 11 year old I helped Aunt Elizabeth Sieck who ran a commercial chicken business. I scraped more chicken dirt that I even want to recall. 

In Hong Kong we ate lots of chicken. Sometimes our Chinese cook would go to market and buy a live one and prepare it. Raw as well as cooked chickens were always hung outside the shops in the market. Every 10 course Chinese feast had at least one chicken course. Our son David went to the market, bought a young live chicken and placed it up on the flat roof of our apartment with the dream that it would be the beginning of his booming business. Unfortunately the heat of Hong Kong had eaten that chicken before the week was out.

Now raising and selling chickens is a major worldwide immense business with fast food chains finding new ways to serve parts of chicken in all kinds of variations. Chicken parts are distributed internationally, and chicken raising has become a focal point of disagreement not only among gourmet cooks but also among environmentalists, vegetarians and animal rights groups.

In the midst of all this Rosie found a friend who secured her safely in bed, that is until tragically one night she slipped out and became a late night dinner for a neighborhood coyote.

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