If Pigs were horses, Poultry Princesses Would Ride

  It’s fall, 1975. I am 5 years old. We live in Tate, Arkansas which-as the locals like to say-you can’t GET to from here. It’s dirt roads twisting from Booneville to Waldron, thru “gov’ment” land and follows the Scott/Logan county line.  My entire world is a walk away from my front porch. My papaw Derald and Granny Viv. My aunt Muff and my uncle Skee, who are my mother’s youngest siblings, still live with Papaw and Granny. I adore them both and secretly wish to marry my uncle Skee even though I know I really cannot. Muff’s real name was Shirley and Skee’s real name was Larry, even though I have never called them by their given names. My church, Union Hope Baptist where  I sit by my aunts and cousins and mom and sing loudly to songs I know by heart. I still cannot read, but have most of the songs memorized at this point. I am walking distance from the outdoor toilet with no door, but that is a story for another time. All my mother’s side of the family, all the people I love. I can start down any road and be at someone’s house who is kinfolk. My uncle Gay and aunt Glenda and my cousins Ricky, Randy, Jerry, and Gayla. I adored them all. My uncle Tony and his wife Darlene. Tony is my mother’s brother. Darlene is my daddy’s sister. That made their daughters LaDonna and Patricia my DOUBLE first cousins and we had the same kin on both sides. My mother was born in the house we lived in, which had no indoor plumbing. We bathed in zinc tubs in the winter…in the kitchen, mama warming the water on the stove.

  I was walking distance from the barn, too…where the pigs were kept and the few cows we had grazed.

  We had 2 pigs, Mama Pig and Nancy. Mama Pig had piglets soon after her arrival and there are proud pictures of her nursing them, me just off the school bus, far in the background in my homemade yellow flowered pantsuit my mama made on the treadle sewing machine, my hair so blonde it looks white in the sun.

  A few days later, I got off the school bus and wandered to the barn to see the piglets. I had never seen anything so darling in my life. I squatted down by the wooden rails in that old barn, so old my mother had played in it as a child. I remembered thinking my mother was very old to me at this time…she was 24. She had 3 children at this time..me, my sister Bobbie and my brother Ray. Ray was 2, Bobbie 4.

  I squatted down and looked at the piglets. They were tiny and sweet, sleeping all in a pile, their little noses sniffing and snuffing. One of the piglets was almost to where I could touch it. I wanted to touch it so badly, I felt I’d cry.

  A warning echoed in my head….from my Granny and my mama. “Stay out of the hog pen, those mama pigs’ll EAT YOU UP.”

  I did not want to be EAT UP, but I sure did want to hold that tiny pig.

 I stuck my pale, thin arm through to wooden slats. I stretched with all my power. The only thing that kept me from going through the slats was my bony shoulder, which scratched and rubbed on the rails. I felt the smooth softness of the piglet. I stroked its eensy leg. I gently wound my fingers around the tiny foot and gently pulled the piglet toward me.

                                 WHEE WHEE WHEE WHHEEEEEEEEEEE

screeched the piglet and that mama pig was UP and to the rails so fast and so hard, she knocked me backward onto the floor of the barn. I thought she’s gonna EAT ME UP and scampered backward on my bottom.

  Mama Pig stared at me through the slats, memorizing my little blonde head for future reference. She did forget in time and never had another litter of piglets. She allowed me and my horse crazy sister to tie ropes around her neck and ride her all over the farm. When she tired of us riding her, she would just FLOP down, throwing us to the ground, where we would sit on her side, scratching her ears. Once, the local riding club rode past our old house on their beautiful horses. I was so jealous, wanting a horse so badly. My cousins LaDonna and Patricia were there and we started riding Mama Pig and Nancy all around the yard as they rode by. Some stopped and took pictures and we posed. After a little bit, the pigs tired of this and flopped onto their sides. So we just sat on them, scratching them and smiled for the pictures. Before long we had a little crowd of people on horseback, talking to us and laughing. We were all in our underwear and barefoot. Daddy said he heard voices and horse hooves and walked out onto the porch, shirtless and shoeless. When the riders saw my dad’s angry face, they trotted off. We waved heartily and I watched for the riding club to come back by every day.  We also taught some of the calves to allow us to ride them and even decorate them. We have a picture of my sister Bobbie and I, standing with our hands on Cocoa the Cow. We had raised her from a bottle and she is wearing a NAPA ball cap, sold at the local parts store. We are wearing dresses my mother made. We thought we looked like Laura and Mary Ingalls in them. We rode the cows until they got to big for us to climb on from the ground and too smart to stand close to the fence, which was a good booster to get up on their bony backs.   

  That barn is gone now. The last time I saw it, I took Trevor and Tara out to the old place. They were probably 10 or 12. I showed them where the piglets were and where we broke the calves to ride. I took them to the outhouse with no door. The tree with the tire swing, where daddy pushed me and Nancy Pig wandered out in front of me just as I made my descent and I hit her broadside, sending her and me both flying. I didn’t think to take my camera that day, a decision that haunts me still.

   All my childhood burned a few years later, in a yet to be explained fire. The house. The outhouse with no door. The barn.

  We have an old barn here on our place. It’s 100 years old, made with square nails and hand hewed boards.  Trevor and Tara played in it every chance they could. Hide and seek from the goat. Tag with the horses. Their friends would come over and I could hear them laughing when I went outside. They filmed silly movies and kept cull chickens up there, feeding them every day, giving them silly names. They carried dogs up the stairs to the hay loft, and carefully carried them back down. It is a home to raccoons, snakes and stray cats. It is a home to memories, of hay and rope swings.  

  It has to come down. It’s unsafe now…we will have grandchildren in a few years and it’s an accident waiting to happen. I know this.

  But when I told my children…my grown, married children that we think we have the lumber sold and the barn will soon be gone, I saw sadness in their eyes. They will take pictures and I will make a collage and we’ll build a new barn, one safe for grandchildren, some day.

  And maybe..someday, they will write about THEIR old barn, the one that is gone now. The barn that was built when their grandparents were young…the grandparents who are gone. They will write of old barns, and piglets and their parent’s stories of Grampa Clint and Granny Lichea. Steady, sure Grampa with his common sense and few words. Granny Lichea, with her crazy laugh and funny stories.

  They will tell of old barns…and us.

 Before I became a Poultry Princess, I was a nurse. LPN school was exactly a year long and Clint and I talked about it. We would give up our lives for one year…no new purchases, just hunker down and get me through school. The kids were young and if I was ever gonna do this, it would be now.  I was NEVER going to be happy if I didn’t have an education…have some letters behind my name. I had worked as a nurse’s aide for years and had a lot of common sense about nurse type stuff. My mom is a nurse and I used to read her nursing books when she was in school, just lay on the couch and read through them. So I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. I went to the local nursing program and applied. The good news was I was accepted immediately. The bad news was Clint made too much money for any financial help. So, Clint sold the 4 wheeler and as the school year progressed, he would load cows up and sell them one at a time to pay bills and buy groceries. A couple of weeks before I graduated, he looked at me and said “you better get done with school…I’m bout outta cows.”

  With the knowledge that my husband was paying out of his pocket for this, I was determined to do my best. I studied and worked hard and made good grades. There were 3 or 4 of us who had a friendly competition to get the highest grade on every test and it alternated with each exam. We would crow loudly amongst ourselves if we were the highest score and sweetly  accuse the others of cheating if we were a point or two behind them. I am proud to say I was in the top scorers of my class, but I will admit to not being the highest. But, of course, they were cheating. J

  But….then we had clinicals. I was familiar in hospitals and nursing homes, having worked in both in some capacity since I was 14. Some of the gals and guys had never set foot in a hospital except to visit someone. So, they paired up the old hands like me (by the way, I was 25) with some of the newbies.

  So off to clinicals we went, the nursing homes and small hospitals….the delivery rooms and new babies…the pediatric units…the surgical suites…there were adventures in every new place and I fully intend to fill you in someday.

  But…today….we will talk about psychiatric units. They paired me with Kathy, a wonderful older lady who had always wanted to be a nurse. She was smart and attractive and had a wonderful way with patients. She had that softness, that caring that some nurses lack. After nursing school, she went to work with an OB doctor and was a wonderful asset to that clinic. All the happy pregnant ladies…all the babies…even in the tragedies that are part of bringing new life, she would cry with them and pray for them.

  On this day, Kathy and I were paired with Jonathan, an 18 year old boy fresh out of high school who wanted to go into nursing. He was smart, but…as I stated…an 18 year old boy. He was unintentionally hilarious and was learning about the human body in ways most 18 year old boys would find uncomfortable to do in the midst of married, middle aged moms.

  They placed us in the lock down unit, where they put the most out of control patients. Some were schizophrenics that had stopped taking their meds. Some were failed suicide attempts, still with the bandages tightly wrapped around not-yet –healed wrists. Some were so out of touch with reality that in the world they would jump in front of cars or leap off of buildings, fully expecting to fly.

  So, Jonathan and Kathy and I were herded into the locked unit. We were instructed to do suicide checks every 15 minutes and given a clipboard with each patient’s name. We were told to visit with the patients and try to orient them on who and where they were. We were told all these things and then, the nurses that ran the unit walked thru the door to their nurses’ station/breakroom behind shatter proof, sound proof glass and lock the door behind them with a solid thud.

  So we happily went about our jobs, industriously checking off boxes on the clip board and visiting. Jonathan settled in with a young man who thought he was “the 7^th son of the 7^th son of the most high god on high that reigns supreme and all superior.” Apparently, this 7^th son business interfered with his delivery job and he was fired and was found naked on his housetop building a shrine. He said this as though he was telling me he had picked up some ground beef at the store, just very easy and normal, just part of his daily life. And I guess it was.

  Anyways, while Jonathan talked to 7^th son of (you know the drill) Kathy and I went from patient to patient, from room to room, cheerily checking off boxes and visiting.

    A couple of hours into this, we noticed a patient missing. There was nowhere to go except the bathroom with no lock on the door, so we waited a little bit and then knocked on the door. The patient missing and assumed in the bathroom was a 40ish woman, solidly built and totally in the grips of her schizophrenia. To read her chart, to read about her childhood and abuse was sickening. Kathy and I felt for her and had visited with her during our sojourn around the unit.

  That’s when I heard the water running and noticed water coming from under the door. I screamed “I’M COMING IN!!” and yanked the door open. Kathy was right behind me and we struggled to understand what we saw.

  The patient…I’ll call her “Mary”…had her head wedged under the faucet with her face in the sink. The water was on full blast and her head was nearly submerged. Her body was limp, her face blue. The only thing holding her up was the sink.  Without thinking, I unwedged her head and yanked her up, turning off the water with the other hand. I saw that she had saved a plastic wrapper from lunch and had used that to cover the drain and fill the sink. Kathy screamed for Jonathan to go get help and alert the nurses. Jonathan ran and we could hear him screaming and yelling and banging on the windows and doors, trying to get the nurses attention. We heard him, but the nurses did NOT.

  It was at this point, Mary suddenly came to life. I had her left arm, Kathy her right. We had been holding her limp body, trying to drag her into the hallway to perform CPR if need be. She came to LIFE with GUSTO and was HACKED that we had rescued her and she calmly began throwing Kathy and I around in that tiny bathroom, screaming LET ME DIE LET ME DIE!! Kathy was being flung hither and fro, up and down. I yelled “Kathy!! Hold her close!! Snug up to her!! She can’t throw you as far!!”  I had learned this from working with cows and horses, that you are actually safer at times to snug up and hang on. If you got a few feet away, they can kick or run over you. But snugged up, you just get thrown around a little.

  So that’s what we did, just hung on for dear life so she couldn’t harm herself. We bounced all over the psych unit, the patients calmly watching the TV and hardly looking at us. Jonathan kept running back and forth saying “I can’t get their attention! They aren’t coming!” and Kathy and I just kept up this dance of trying to hang on and being thrown and bounced. Finally, the nurses came and rescued us (and Mary) and got her in a soft, padded room (yup, they exist) and the 3 of us sat down in the nurse’s break room and tried to process what had just happened.

  That’s when our clinical instructor came and quietly walked us from the psych unit. She informed us we couldn’t go back. I said “you mean, not go back today?” and she said “no…you can’t ever go back…none of us can. We’re being thrown out of the psych unit.” Kathy and Jonathan and I processed this and the clinical instructor said “you’re not even supposed to be IN the locked unit without a psych nurse, much less doing suicide checks by yourself, locked in with the patients. You could have been killed.” She paused and said “I was in with another student, if they had told me you were locked in, I would have pulled you out myself  and reported the nurses to the nursing supervisor.”

  As it turned out, the hospital found out that the nurses had allowed us to do their jobs while they took it easy in the breakroom. They were all written up and admonished and as their punishment, the nursing students (and all their help) was taken away. Forever.

  And so, that was my experience in the psych unit. There are several things I think about when people say “I can’t believe you gave up your nursing career to be a CHICKEN FARMER. Don’t you miss it?” This is one of those things.

  A lot of stuff went thru my head as Mary threw me around, as she screamed LET ME DIE…like…I’m not going to be here next time. One day, she’s gonna succeed. I don’t know what happened to Mary… I wish I did. She is a star in a funny story…but she is a tragic person. I still pray for her.

  Kathy and I were so bruised and sore the next day, we just hugged and cried. I miss Kathy. We kept up with each other by phone after nursing school and then one day I got a call that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Kathy died one summer and I made the drive to her hometown to go to her visitation.

  Her husband recognized me immediately and held both my hands and he said “Kathy said you made her laugh every day in nursing school,  you made even  the psych ward story funny and she loved to tell it, imitating you as Mary threw you both around.” He said Kathy would exaggerate her southern accent and yell “  COME ON NOW, KATHY!! SNUG ON UP TO HER!! SHE CAIN’T THOW Y’ALL IFFIN’Y’ALL ARE SNUGGED UP TO ‘ER!! JUST LIKE A CALF, KATHY!! SAME THANG!!”

  It makes me smile that Kathy found humor in that day with Mary. I wish she and I could get together and act it out again, like we did for our nursing class, using Jonathan as Mary. He played along and threw us around and we saved the day. I miss her.

  Then, for our final act, we would pretend we were thrown out of the psych unit right on our keisters without so much as a thank you.

 But…you’re welcome, anyway.

I do believe the cows are trying to kill me.

 I have evidence.

While Clint is at work, it is my job to check cows that are due to calve. Laboring cows love to find the most hidden away, hard to get to places to calve. So, I bounced out into the pasture on my bright orange Kubota (it’s like a golf cart on steroids)  to find 45 (that was the number on her ear tag when we got her and even when the ear tag is gone, the name stays) She is a Charolais cross, which are notorious for having trouble calving. This was also her first calf, which can also be a problem.

  I found her, right in the middle of the calves under the trees right on a ledge above the creek. It wasn’t so late in the summer that the creek was dry, there were still deep hollows filled with water and cottonmouths and the occasional stranded fish.  

  She looked to be in trouble. She strained and pushed. I could see the calves front feet poke out, then go back in. She strained again, raising her head off the ground, eyes bulging with the strain. I called Clint.

  “Go get the pulling chains! You may have to pull that calf! Call Trevor!” he said. “If she gets in more trouble, I’ll call Garland to come help.” I flew away in the Kubota and ran into the shop and grabbed the chains and an old towel.

   When I got there, OUT popped the calf right in front of me. I was so glad I wasn’t going to have to pull it. My happiness was shortlived.

  As soon as the calf tried to stand up, it teetered toward the edge of the cliff. I prayed and yelled  NO NO NO…but the calf fell off the cliff. It landed about 3 feet down, right above a pile of brush….right above a deep water hole. Every time it stood up, it fell further. I got off the Kubota and pondered my options.

   I waited until 45 got distracted by Maggie the dog. Maggie was walking lower down and 45 ran toward her to run her away from her calf. I tiptoed toward the calf and grabbed ahold of it’s tiny back foot and started pulling it up toward the top of the ravine.

  That’s when Maggie shot up TOWARD me, drawing 45’s attention to ME and that’s also when a few things were hit home in sudden clarity and sureness: I am FORTY ONE YEARS OLD. I am NOT built for speed. I CANNOT run UPHILL while dragging a 75 pound calf. I am NOT faster than a hacked off cow.

  You know that sound the T. Rex on the movie Jurassic Park? That’s the sound I heard as 45 chased me up the ravine. I felt her hot breath on the back of my legs just before her head came up under my rear end and I saw the top of the tree as I was thrown into it. I hit branches on the way down and slammed into the dirt on my left side. 45 was waiting on me, and used her head to pound me into the side of the tree. I had fallen about 7 feet from the air and was stunned and had the wind knocked out of me, but I knew to curl around the tree and cover my head. She suddenly stopped pummeling me and turned.

  That’s when I rolled over and saw she was trying to kick me. Instinctively, I threw my right hand up and felt the hoof graze it. Then she stepped backward onto the bicep of my right arm. I felt my muscles and skin burn. She ran away back to her calf and I just lay there.

  There I was, on the ground, on my back, staring up at the trees. It was weirdly quiet and all I could hear was 45 sniffing and snuffing and mooing gently to the new calf. I sat up and patted myself to see how badly I was hurt. I stood up, spit the dirt out of my mouth and started walking toward the Kubota. I stopped to catch my breath and called Clint. I had just started telling him what had happened and was listening to him YELL at me for getting hurt by being stupid  when….RAWWWRRRRRRRRR!!! Jurassic Park again. I turned, phone still to my ear and HERE SHE CAME AGAIN, roaring and snorting. I started running and screaming, feeling her hot breath and slobber on the backs of my bare legs. I made it to the Kubota, climbed in and by this time I was crying in great, big gulps and screams. I put the phone back up to my head and Clint was SCREAMING my name, telling his coworkers he had to go tend to his injured, cow stomped wife. I finally got his attention and told him I was basically ok, but the calf was even closer to the creek.

  “I don’t CARE about a dead CALF… I CARE about a hurt WIFE… go HOME!” 

  I didn’t go home. My friend Carolyn had called just as I was heading out to find 45 that sunny day. “Be careful.” she said. “Don’t get close to the calf.” she warned. The last thing she said? “I’m gonna put my shoes on and be ready when that mama gets you.” So when I called her, the first thing she said was not “hello!” but “how bad did she get you? I’m headed over.” So we sat on the Kubota for a couple of hours, watching the calf narrowly miss falling into the water every 10 minutes and marvel at my growing bruises. They were spectacular and impressive. They also hurt and I was starting to feel like I’d been hit by a truck.

  When Clint came home, I rode out there with him. I did NOT get off the Kubota, I pretended to be Merlin Perkins from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom watching safely from the helicopter while hapless Jim wrestled with a water buffalo. Clint dodged her, ran and got behind trees, hit her across the face with sticks and finally got her to take her baby AWAY from the deep water hole.

  I tell you THAT to tell you THIS.

 Clint asked me this morning to go check Big Holstein. She was in labor last night. It’s not her first calf, she’s had several and she’s big and broad hipped and tall. She never has trouble, but you never know.

  So in the cold January drizzle, I headed out on my Kubota to find Big Holstein. She is gentle and usually not any trouble, but all that flies out the window when there’s a calf involved. I found her, in front of the chicken houses by a little grove of cedar trees. She calved there last year and a lot of times, they favor the same spot. I made my MAAAAAAA sound to trick her into looking toward her calf. It makes them think the calf is bawling, although Clint says he can’t figure out how I fool them as my MAAAAAA sound really sounds like someone is throttling a cat. She looked……toward the creek.

  Here’s the deal: that grove of cedar trees is 20 feet from the edge of the small cliff over a flooded creek. She had bedded that beautiful, tiny calf on the EDGE. On the EDGE. Above the WATER, flowing furiously due to our massive rains.  I called Clint.

  I told him where she had the calf bedded down. He said “of course she did.” I said “I’ll come back and check later to see if she moved it.” “no, just leave it alone. You’ll be tempted to “help” and I don’t want you gettin’ hurt.”

  So I told Big Holstein she better have birthed that calf with FLIPPERS and taught it to swim, cause it was on it’s own. Maggie and I headed home.  

  So…can you see why I think there’s a vast conspiracy? They want me to head down that bank, in my slick boots and middle age to try to rescue a calf. They wanna make it look like an accident. Well, I’m on to them. They’re just made that we put T-Bone (a beautiful bull calf) up to feed and butcher. Even if we are eating hamburgers, I announce “we are eating T-BONE!!” and he is so tender and so good.

  They’re trying to take me out before I turn another one of them into Sunday-after-church-roast-and-potatoes.

   I’ve already got my next victim picked out. He’s a beautiful bull calf. His name? Sir Loin

I like snakes.

I always have.

  Often, in the warm weather, black snakes will hang around in my chicken houses. They lie along the wall, snugged up onto the cool concrete edge of the footing. The chickens give the snake wide berth. I wonder what goes thru a chicken’s mind when that snake slithers through the middle of them. They part like the Red Sea and watch him closely as he slides gracefully thru.

  Sometimes….I touch them or even pick them up. They aren’t poisonous and I know they can bite, but it seems they never want to. I gently pick them up, right behind their beautiful head and look at their eyes.  

  I love the feel of their cool, smooth, dry skin and how strong they are when they coil around my wrist. How their muscles feel, so close under the skin as they slide away from me.

  When Clint is out there with me, I’ll catch one and carry it to where he is. He’ll say “put that down, woman! Leave those snakes alone! They’ll pop you one day!”

  But they never pop me, never even strike at me. They just coil around my arm and hold tight. I am fascinated by them and look for them every summer. I’ll call Clint and say “he was back today! in the same spot!” Clint will ask if I picked it up and I’ll say “of course!” and he says “woman, one of these days you are gonna get POPPED. That snake will get you.” One of the biggest fights we ever had he killed my two black snakes that hung out in House 3. I was at church camp, being a lunch lady for our youth group and I called him to see how things were going and if he was enjoying staying home with the chickens for a change. He said he was and told me about catching 2 large black snakes in the middle of all the baby chicks in house 3. I said “oh, yes, they’ve been in there every day! They must be a male and female, eating mice” Clint said “NO they were eating BABY CHICKS and they had about FIVE each before I got to them and so I KILLED them.”

  I purt near cried. I said “ baby! They couldn’t eat enough baby chicks to hurt anybody. Maybe they get tired of mice. Don’t kill my snakes.”

  “woman! You are so silly about those stupid snakes. They were eating chicks and I killed them and that’s that.” he said.  I still bring that up to him and he says the same thing. “they were eating CHICKS!! So I killed them!! You eat chicks, you die!”

 

  Which brings me to my story of the day. I was walking chickens early one morning and I noticed my usual black snake near the door of House 2. I saw it almost every day and missed it when I didn’t see it. But this time…he seemed to be trapped.

  Each house has 6 mouse bait stations…made out of 3 pieces of 1 ½ in PVC pipe and a T joint. I don’t glue them, just  stick them together so I can put rat poison in them and the chickens can’t get to the poison.

  My snake seemed to have gone in one side of the station, ate a mouse, then tried to go BACK thru and his bulging belly was sticking out one end and his head and tail the other. I pondered on what to do, but thought it best to see if he could get out on his own.

  Every hour or so, I came back and there he was. Still stuck. I knew if he couldn’t let the mouse go thru the process of digestion, the snake would die.

  So after lunch, I unscrewed the bait station from the wall and tried to take it apart with the annoyed snake not understanding what I was doing.

  I got it mostly apart and the snake saw his chance to get away, but he wasn’t completely out of danger and was still caught in part of the pipe.

  So there I stood, pieces of PVC pipe in one hand and a hacked off snake in the other. I could use one hand to pull the pipe apart (the other hand being full of hacked off black snake) but that left the business end to POP me and so what to do? I finally grasped the snake’s head between my bare  knees and pulled the pipes apart and VOILA! the snake was FREE AT LAST. Can I get an amen?  

  He wasn’t as pleased with my help as I had hoped. He seemed to glare at me and I suspected that if I was EVER gonna get POPPED it was now. But he didn’t get me. I followed him for a while, but I could tell he wasn’t having it and I watched him slip into a hole in the wall.

  Soon as the weather warms, he’ll be back. I’ll tell him you said “hello!” I’ll also tell him firmly “if y’all wanna live around here, stick to eating the mice. If you eat baby chicks, Clint will POP you!”

I don't have time to write much today, but I do want to thank those of you who are reading and following me.
  I was so scared to do this blog...to just put memories and thoughts and happenings in print. I appreciate your comments so much.
 So, tomorrow..the continuing story of...
  
   The Perils of a Poultry Princess

( cue dramatic music)

God and tractors

  I have had to learn a lot of new things in the chicken houses. I have learned: fix a feeder if it’s not broken TOO badly. Fix a water line. Troubleshoot and tear equipment down so that when Clint gets home, all he has to do is fix and reassemble. Shovel 2 tons of feed that have spilled inside the house. (It takes ALL day). Troubleshoot a broken fan. Run a complicated computer controller that is basically the brain of the house. Kill a chicken without giving myself carpal tunnel. Fall in a way that I don’t hurt myself or more importantly, rip something out of the ceiling. Cut cracked, leaking water hoses that feed the water lines and replace. Carry, load, and shoot my pistol without wanting to cry at the loud noise. Get the houses ready for baby chicks without walking myself plumb to death.  Explain to the dude at the Poultry Equipment place what I need and that even though I don’t LOOK like a chicken farmer I AM a chicken farmer and I know what I am talking about. Duck under something even if I don’t think I need to (the top of my head bears a few scars) Not sit down and cry if there’s a flood inside the house from a broken water line. I just put my big girl panties on and go to WORK, right after I call Clint (bawling) to come home from his job. I’ve learned not to cry TOO much when there’s a flood, there’s enough water in there already.  I’ve also learned that God is in control. But mostly…I learned to drive a tractor.  

   I am very proud of my tractor driving skills. We never had a tractor growing up and it’s new to me and slightly scary. But it feels natural and useful to drive a tractor with a load on it on a fine, sunny day. I feel accomplished and well rounded. All except for the time I didn’t put the bucket down on the front of the tractor and I left it in neutral, which Clint discovered when it began rolling down the driveway and toward the pond. Or the time we had a HUGE brush hog hooked onto the back and I thought I’d do Clint a favor. He had been up all night with the chickens…they were “going out”, a term which means the company comes and gets them and you get a few days off. So Clint was asleep…it was about 5 in the afternoon and the catch crew left and I thought “ I think I’ll do Clint a favor and let him rest! I’ll go pick up the dead that’s left and he’ll be thrilled!” often…some of the chickens die or get run over by the fork lift. I try to tell them when they are babies to not run toward the light (of the fork lift) but they insist on it. So, often, there are a hundred or so 6-7 pound chickens left dead on the floor. So I went out there, hopped on the tractor and started her up. I had a moment of “should you REALLY be driving this with that GINORMOUS brush hog on the back?” it was about 10 feet wide and very onerous and awkward. When you drive a tractor with this size brush hog, you have to raise it WAY up and sometimes if you hit a bump too fast you will feel the front wheels of the tractor want to leave the ground and upend said tractor.  I ignored my intelligent self and just drove thru the doors of house 3. They slide toward each other to close the house off. I was being SO careful, watching to left and back of me so as not to hit the left door. That’s when I heard CRUUUNNNNCCHHHHHHH!!! and realized I had caught the right door and ripped it inward almost  in half. I was so mad at myself, but thought..ummm….maybe I’ll tell Clint the catch crew did it? so I sucked it up and went on in and picked up the 75 chickens that were left. I turned that big old tractor around inside the chicken house, carefully dodging the feed and water lines we had rolled up to the ceiling.  I was nervous as I headed toward the doors, the sunlight blinding me just long enough to catch the left door and  CRUUUNNNNCHCHCHCH …rip it off, too. I burst into tears and sat there, tractor running, front end loader full of stinky dead chickens. I set the front end down, put the tractor in neutral (see, I CAN be taught)  and climbed down and began to pick the broken shards and giant splinters of wood off of the brush hog. Thru my gritted teeth and tears I vowed to hide the evidence and tell Clint “LOOK WHAT THE CATCH CREW DID!! HOW STUPID ARE THEY?? DON’T THEY CARE HOW HARD WE WORK???”. That’s when I looked up, arms full of twisted metal and pieces of wood, and saw Clint, watching me thru the window of his truck He had awakened to find me gone and knew what I was doing and instantly thought “I better go check on her…” .With the sound of my tears AND the tractor, I hadn’t heard him pull up. Stunned was the only word I could use to describe him, but there are probably others. I looked at him solemnly and said “LOOK WHAT THE CATCH CREW DID!! AND THEY TRIED TO BLAME IT ON ME!!”  

Biscuits

I made biscuits today...I thought of my Granny Viv. She always had something cooking on the stove, always something to eat. Chicken and dumplings. Soup. Chocolate cake with that homemade, slightly crunchy frosting.
  Biscuits.
Is there a more perfect food? I submit there is NOT and I thought that while I mixed the flour and shortening and milk. I sprinkled the counter with flour and rolled out my dough, folding softly, kneading slightly. "not too much, they'll get tough" I hear in my head. My mama's voice? My granny's? My own? I am not sure as flour, roll, knead, then cut. I don't have a biscuit cutter, I use an old soup can I cut both ends out of and washed good. How do I know that? Cut. Put on the cookie sheet. Cut. Scooch that one over to make room for it's brother. I put them in the oven and clean my flour mess as they cook.
  Biscuits. Smell them, they are almost done. Oh, another minute or two. Get out the jelly I made last summer, with muscadines I picked and boiled down for the juice.
  I pull them out, oh they are HOT but I cool them down with a glop of jelly. They are warm and soft and slightly crumb-y. I think of Granny Viv, with her cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, occasional possum, baby squirrel, and my favorite...baby skunks. They were smart and sweet, so cute. Oh, no, Lichea...you can't keep them as a pet. Go take it back to its box. I sadly take back the baby skunk and when mama takes me home daddy says GOOD LORD YOU STINK and runs me out.
  But all I smell now are biscuits and I take one to Clint, my husband of happy 23 years. He eats one and says "woman, you've just about learned how to cook!" I smile, it's our little joke. I tease he married me because I made him fried chicken, iced tea, gravy, and of course...biscuits. I was 17 and eager to show this wonderful man he couldn't live without me. How had he made it to 23 without starving? We married 5 months after we met, just a few months after the fried chicken dinner.
  We eat all the biscuits without shame and nod at each other, not speaking. We are eating biscuits and I think of Granny Viv. I have her old apron, hand mended in places. She's been gone for 7 years, she died right before my birthday in July. I was with her when she died, along with  my Papaw Derald and my mom and aunts... had sat with my aunts and uncles for the last 2 weeks as she drifted in and out of conciousness. I suctioned her, helped turn her and prayed. She told me before she died that she WANTED to die, she wanted to GO ON and see her mama. She said "you'll be fine without ME, that's for sure." I told her I would and I guess I am. I guess we all are, but all of us gals do things like she did...without even knowing. I'll eye that stack of magazines..books..and I know. There she is. "I'm grannying it up!" I'll call my sister and crow to her. Bobbie will laugh and agree and we will talk about how we are like her.
  Biscuits. Papaw loved granny's biscuits and would grab them off the pan, while they were too hot to hold and he would jostle back and forth saying "ow ow ow" while granny would shoo him toward the table and hand him something sweet...jelly or honey or sorghum..to put on his biscuit. He would smile and drink his coffee and eat.
  When granny died, we knew it was coming. My aunt Debbie had called me early that morning to say "come. It's time." I drove to the hospital, praying I got there in time. Why? Why did I have to be there? Would she know? I would.
  I drove and the song on my cd player was an old Fernando Ortega song..the title escapes me, but the words are about childhood and trying to make it back to see his mother.."keep her safe, one more night..til I get home."
  We gathered around her bed, Papaw in his wheelchair...my mom...my aunts...we sang and whispered softly.
  Papaw suddenly straightened in his chair. "She's gone." he said.
  He was right. He said "I felt her leave." I didn't feel her leave.

   I never have.

  Here’s how to make biscuits like my Granny Viv:

  First, take a big old mixing bowl from somewhere and whack it over the trash can to knock any dead bugs out of it. Fill said bowl with an amount of flour known only to you. Plop a glop of Crisco about the size of your fist in the center of the dough. Grab a wooden spoon from out of nowhere. Mix  vigorously. Reach into the fridge and get the gallon glass jar of raw cow’s milk with mystery clots floating in it. Pour some of this into the flour while stirring. When it clumps together, knock a cat off the table with your left hand and dump the dough on the table. Knead the dough while continuing to shoo at flies and cats. Sprinkle with flour to prevent sticking, until it becomes a consistency that you admire.  Begin halving the dough, once, twice…as many times as needed to make a ball of dough the size of a cat’s head. This is why they are called cathead biscuits. Pull a cookie sheet out of the oven, while also pulling out the duck’s eggs in an old cardboard box you have been incubating by the pilot light. Do NOT preheat the oven until the duck’s eggs are safely out. Look closely at the duck’s eggs to see if any ducklings are emerging and speak sweetly to the ones that are trying. Say something like “he was a good boy, he was”.  Set the box of duck’s eggs onto the floor. Grab the leftover bacon grease still in a frying pan from breakfast and dip each raw biscuit into the grease and flip over onto the cookie sheet so the grease side is up. Slide into the oven and bake til done. You will know they are done by some sort of psychic baking sense that will make you stop midsentence and pull them out of the oven with an old dishrag or the corner of your worn, mended apron as a pot holder.  Serve with butter and jelly that have been sitting on the table, uncovered, for several days and fresh eggs that you just gathered that morning, the yolks of which are the brightest, orangey yellow imaginable. Make no comment about these eggs being any different than the duck’s eggs you treat so tenderly. Sop your biscuit into the sunny, runny yolk. This will taste…like love.

Bloop Bloop

I remember distinctly our first batch of chickens back in September 2002 was a memorable one. Mostly, because I had just come out of working as a nurse since 1997 and my last job was in surgery, a clean precise environment. The houses still had a few things not done..who am I kidding? There's things STILL not done. One weird thing was small, nylon strings that apppeared out of the concrete at the base of the walls of the chicken houses, several feet in length. I didn't think anything about this string and just walked past it every day, dead chickens in hand and some audiobook playing in my headphones.
  The chickens were a couple of weeks old and every day was the same, walk thru the chickens, pick up the dead, cull the sick, blah blah blah.
  But this day...I shooed the chickens away from the wall to walk thru and noticed this ONE chicken, staring intently at the floor, close to the wall. I shooed and I shooed, but there he stayed. Staring at the floor. So I knelt down to see what in the world was SO interesting to a chicken. His beak was almost completely touching the floor. To my horror, I noticed small, nylon string going UP into his beak. I pulled out my pocket knife and cut the string as close to the floor as I could. I picked him up and held the string in my left hand, chicken in the right. I thought "Well...I'll just pull the string out!" So...I tried.
  It didn't go as I had hoped...when I gently pulled the string, the, ahem, BACK end of the chicken pulled INWARD. It looked as though I was going to pull him inside out.
  So I killed him. Unfortunately, this is how most of my "guess what a chicken did today?" stories end. I told this story at my son's basketball game while sitting by two of the moms I had become close to. When I told the story, I stood up and BECAME the chicken...I CHANNELED that chicken and when I got to the part when the evil chicken farmer pulled the string, I thrust the lower half of my body forward with each string pull and for SOME reason said "BLOOP BLOOP" in a high pitched voice.

  To this day, there is a segment of my friends that when they see me...they pretend to pull a string and they yell BLOOP BLOOP, often across the gym or Walmart or parking lot. I BLOOP BLOOP back at 'em and people stare at us like we've lost our minds.

 After the BLOOP BLOOP incident, I went thru all 3 chicken houses, cutting the string carefully with my pocket knife as close to the concrete as I could. 

   Tis a fine thing to have friends that can yell two words at you whilst doing a vaguely vulgar dance and immediately, you are back to that time in the County Line gym so long ago and the famous words BLOOP BLOOP became part of your vernacular.   

  May you, my dear friend, have friends that yell their own version of BLOOP BLOOP at you.  

Alright all you people that told me to START WRITING THIS STUFF DOWN...here you go :)

I'm sitting in my office...which used to be my daughter Tara's bedroom. She got married last May and I am trying very hard not to refer to the GUEST bathroom as TARA'S bathroom and call the office...the office and NOT Tara's room and not call the GUEST room "Trevor's room". Sigh. It is hard to know how to adjust to this time in my life. I'm enjoying it...it's just...different.
   It is hard being a poultry princess and having an empty nest. My chicks flew the coop. Insert any chicken joke you know here to save me from typing it. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from Ms. Soggy Bottoms. (the name of our farm, and yes, we named it while watching "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
  I am:  a Christian.41. Former nurse. Married 23 years. 2 kids, Trevor and Tara, both grown and married. Blonde. Constantly trying to lose 15 pounds. The pounds are winning. I unapologetically wear entirely too much eye makeup for my age and my hair bears a strange resemblance to Loreal 9/12 Color Supreme.
  I'm also a chicken farmer. I could bore you with the details of how this came to be, but suffice it to say at the age of 32 we built chicken houses on our 56 acres and it seemed to make more sense financially for me to stay home.
  Bets were taken on how long I would last. Mostly that prissy, lipglossed Lichea Bottoms would tire of being dirty and turn her nose up at dead chickens and maggots and hard work.
  Poo I say to that. Poo again. Like any good southern woman with Jesus in her heart and a good man at my side, I don't mind getting dirty...I just don't want to STAY dirty. There's a place for grubby, a dear place in my heart made by growing up with no running water and outdoor toilets and wringer washers and clotheslines and baths in zinc tubs.
  So I left my pristine, sterile job in surgery and took on farm life and it has been a blessing from God. I got to spend time home with my children as they made their way thru high school. I became a better cook, seamstress, wife, and friend. I would say "mom" but that seems a teensy bit arrogant and perhaps someday you can ask my children.
  There is much in life, dear friend, that is like working in chicken houses. It's hard, tedious work, often frightfully boring and nasty. There is death and storms and the occasional broken water line, flooding all your good work. Lightning DOES strike twice in the same place, just ask Chicken House 3. You have to cull the ones who don't measure up...just as you would rid your life of a toxic "friend". They are God's chickens, I tell myself that everyday...God's chickens and NOT mine, I am only here to tend and care and work. Sometimes, in His wisdom, He may choose to call them home early, leaving us with dead chickens as far as the eye can see and a smaller paycheck. I try not to question and just start grabbing dead chickens by the legs and carrying as many as I can to the front end loader.
  This is my Poultry Princess life and this is my story. I invite you in :)