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I have eleven chickens living in my house.
If you had told me a few years ago that I would have eleven chickens living in my house, I would not have believed it. I can assure you that at no time during the course of my childhood did chickens live in our house or even near it. My only experience with chickens was when I visited my grandmother on my mother’s side. She lived in a small town in Oklahoma (Frederick), but she had lived most of her life on a farm on the dusty Plains not far outside Frederick, where my mother grew up. My mother, like my father who could not get out of the West Virginia hollers fast enough, could barely wait to shake off the rural dustbowl of her childhood. (They certainly had something in common when they got married!) They went off to live ever after and raise their children in clean-cut, luxurious suburbia outside large cities from D.C. to Los Angeles to Dallas/Fort Worth, happily eschewing their country hardships and salt-cured hams.
But like my father took me to visit his West Virginia roots, my mother took me to Oklahoma. The fact that once I was at that turning point in my life where I chose to come to West Virginia, I chose it over Oklahoma, might have something to do with the flat, dusty, wide-open nothingness of those Oklahoma Plains, but I was just as baffled by life there as I was sometimes by what I saw when we visited West Virginia. My grandmother in Frederick lived in an old, tiny house, but she had a big screened-in back porch where she kept a bed. As in, a real bed, with a mattress and everything. If this wasn’t enough to blow my little suburban mind in which beds did not invade the perfectly manicured back patios (nothing but a barbeque dare do that), she had chickens.
And sometimes, in the afternoon, she would go outside and get dinner. I peered outside the windows of her little tiny house and could not believe what she did to those chickens.
She didn’t name them or treat them as pets or let them live in her house. Unless living in her house included their after-life in her frying pan.
I was always a little bit scared of my Oklahoma grandmother. She had some cajones I had no ability to grasp.
She also made me hand-sewn doll babies and she called me “Sue-Anne” (because she couldn’t pronounce that bizarre Frenchified “Suzanne” that my so-citified mother named me) and she always told me that I had pretty legs. My Oklahoma grandmother was upfront that way. She said whatever she was thinking, even if it was weird. I figure life on the farm in the dusty Plains where you could be blown away by a tornado any moment was pretty plain that way.
I guess I’ll never be as tough as either my Oklahoma grandmother or my West Virginia one–because I’m sure she broke some chicken necks in her day, too. But like my chicken lady who gave me my eggs said to me, “Once I’ve held them, petted them, listened to them sing to me, I can’t eat them.”
Me, I’m having a hard time just letting them go outside. They’re roosting in my office and sometimes I think they are plotting a coup and planning a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. But it’s time. I need to send my babies to kindergarten, or at least the chicken house.
I’m scared to let go!
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They used to tell this story over a nice chicken dinner. Myself, I would be a vegetarian before I would butcher my own meat.
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I bet they will love that lovely house you built for them though. And what fun to go out in the morning and visit and collect the eggs.
Easy for me to say
– I never had “raised” chicks….
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Love your hen stories… They’ll be fine outside and just wait until you see them doing the scratchy hen thing out there – you’ll be so proud of your growed up hens!
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We live in Oklahoma City and I’m definitely a city girl, but I do love the “nothingness” of the plains. I love the wide open spaces and being able to see miles in any direction.
When my daughter got ready to go to college, she considered Duke in North Carolina, but after she visited there, she wasn’t sure she could manage to live in the middle of all the trees. It made her nervous not to be able to see what was all around her.
Geography definitely makes us who we are.
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http://www.homesteadblogger.com/countryhomeschoolin/89694/
I am sure you would have the “cajones” too if the time arose…. after all you are now a farm gal! And we are a tough breed.
Blessings, Jeanette
3:59
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Uh, I would think the smell of chicken poop would be motivation enough to get them out of your house.
Most of us are pretty far removed from our sources of food today, which really isn’t a good thing, IMO. Particularly considering how animals and birds are raised, how they are killed, and the conditions in which slaughter-house people work. That said, the only way I could kill an animal or bird to eat would be if I were literally starving and it was life and death. And frankly, maybe not even then. Which makes me a hypocrite, since I do eat meat and poultry.
-Kim
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Me… I’ll take my neat little filets on a styrofoam tray anytime. I think if I had to raise and kill my own poultry, I would go veg really quick. I could raise them no problem, but …
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