It hasn’t sunk in yet to me that it’s winter. Today is Groundhog Day, that day when we all look toward a large rodent to see our future. Is it just me, or are these the actions of a drunk or mentally ill person? “Think I’ll head up in the attic and see if the squirrels know how much annual rain fall we’re gonna get next year!” We haven’t even HAD winter yet, so six more weeks of it seems like no big deal. Also, it’s 65 outside and I’ve got stuff trying to come up in the flower beds. I have a little poem I say when I see yellow flowers starting up and we haven’t even had a good freeze yet. I don’t know if I wrote it or if I read it somewhere. It goes:
Daffodil, you silly thing
go back to bed…
it’s not yet spring.
Daffodils don’t listen to me, they are Narcissus J and they eventually get their blooms frostbitten off.
The reason it hasn’t sunk in it’s winter is what we dealt with last summer. A month of 115 degree days, no rain, no relief. It was hard on the farm animals, they started looking poor and listless. I felt their pain.
But the most pain I felt was dealing with big chickens. Imagine..26,000 chickens in a 50’ by 500’ solid sidewall house. 9 fans per house. 3 chicken houses. Cool cells, with their pads moistened by pond water, the air pulled thru by fans, using evaporation to cool the air. Fogger lines running thru the houses with water at 120 pounds of pressure per square inch, pushing the water out in a fine mist to cool even further. Even with all this…we can only drop the temp by 20 degrees. So at best, I was running them at 95 during the day and maybe down to 78 at night. Big chickens need to be kept cool. They run a normal body temp of 106. When they get overheated, often they’ll just lay down and die. They are wimpy, these chickens and not at all like the chickens my granny had that ran and scratched and fought. These chickens only know a few things. Eat. Drink. Poop. Sleep. That’s it. Keep them warm when they’re little and cool when they’re big. The latter is hard to do when it’s 115.
Sometimes, for whatever reason, there’d be a “dead spot” where the air didn’t get stirred enough. You know dead spots when you see them because there will be a pile of dead chickens. There goes your profits, there goes the feed you put in them, the weight they gained…all gone.
There was one Sunday morning in the middle of this heat wave that I went to walk chickens and I walked into house 3 and there were dead chickens EVERYWHERE…it ended up being over a thousand. Who knows what happened, it didn’t matter. We added time to the cool cells and the next day it was better, but who knows. I was carrying as many 6 pound chickens as I could per hand and kicking 3 up the aisle with my feet when I felt a burning in my right wrist. I ignored it and kept on carrying dead chickens, kept throwing them as far as I could so keep from having to carry them as far…
I don’t know WHAT I did to my wrist, but it’s never been the same. It pops and burns and my fingers go numb. I’m sure it’s carpal tunnel, I’m a nurse, I worked in surgery...but admitting it would mean having to FIX it and that ain’t happenin’. At least not right now.
We found the big pile of dead chickens right about the time we started running out of water. So, Clint found a tanker truck and every evening would haul water from one pond to another. I would go out there as I drove back and forth on the Kubota, checking chickens. I had to check chickens every hour in that kind of heat and sometimes, I’d be out there so long doing something, I just wouldn’t even go home…just check them again. Check the water pressure. Check the fog lines. Check the holding tanks. Check. Check. Check. That’s actually the sound baby chicks make. It’s not “cheep cheep” it’s CHECK CHECK. I barely had time for showers or meals. We grazed on cereal and sandwiches. I became the color of mahogany and began wearing sunblock for the first time in my life. My house became dirtier and dirtier. I wouldn’t even go check the mail in Ratcliff for fear that I’d have a flat or something and not be able to get back to the chicken houses. I’d walk outside every hour on the hour to climb up on the Kubota, the air so hot it felt like I was trying to breathe in an oven. The newscasters would warn viewers to STAY INSIDE!! DON’T GO OUT!! and I’d laugh and head outside, knowing I was going to spend 20 minutes every hour out in this heat. I became accustomed to it and after a while, it didn’t bother me so much.
When they finally came and got the chickens, I was at a loss. I was shell shocked and stunned. I avoided going outside, even when it cooled off to 95. I didn’t want to get in the pool, didn’t want to go for walks, didn’t want to work in the flower beds. I wanted to stay inside in the cool and dark.
Even now, when I go outside and it’s 50, I’m surprised. I fully expect to take a deep breath and feel the inside of my lungs sizzle. We were put on a slow simmer last summer and reduced to the bare basics of what we were, which was trying to survive and keep the farm intact.
I would dream at night of broken water lines or dry river beds filled with dead chickens. I couldn’t even talk on the phone to my friends because I was either driving TO the chicken houses, AT the chicken houses, driving BACK from the chicken houses. It consumed us. My friends told me later they grieved for me…they’d turn on the local weather, see the temps… and just hang their heads and say prayers for chicken farmers. Clint and I were on the local news once…Clint’s niece is married to their camera man and they needed a story about heat affecting chicken farmers. I had my face on that day (if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have let them come out) and so they came out and filmed us, walking thru the chickens. We watched it back and laughed, Clint sounding so southern, like those people they interview about the tornado jumping over their trailer house. “mama said, I think it’s a tornado!! sounds like a dadburn TRAIN!”
So, on this Groundhog Day…as you and your family gathers around the Groundhog Tree and exchange rodent themed presents…as you baste your roasted Groundhog in it’s own juices, singing Groundhog Carols…thank him for six more weeks of winter. This ol’ gal sure would appreciate it
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