Spring Chickens

In the spring, patchy snow still decorating fields and the sides of the gravel roads, we drove to town.  Several boxes of peeping baby chicks were loaded into the backseat beside me.  I looked through the holes in the boxes at the yellow balls of feathers climbing over each other while keeping up a chorus of peeps.

At home the chicks were taken out of the boxes and put in the brooder house.  The middle of this house contained a low, metal tent-like structure (the brooder) with light bulbs on the underside to keep the chicks warm.  Several watering bottles and trays of food surrounded the tent.  The yellow puff balls ran around on their little stick legs.  They bumped into each other and stepped in their water and food.

I liked to go into the peeping building and 'help' with the feeding and watering of the chicks as long as they were little yellow balls.  When they started growing white feathers they became unattractive and hard looking.  The waiting time for the first fried chicken started.  The chicks grew into chickens.  The weather warmed and the brooder was removed.  A fenced yard for the chickens was added outside and the brooder house became a chicken house.

Six or eight weeks after the peeping boxes were brought home, Mother started catching the larger chickens and feeling their legs to determine if they were big enough to eat.  Finally, the day arrived for the first fried spring chicken.  Of course there was work to be done.  Dad sharpened a long machete-like knife.  He caught the doomed chicken and took it to a tree stump.  With a quick chop he separated the head from the body and let the body go.  We watched it hop around spattering blood until it lay still in the grass.  The body was dunked in boiling water and the feathers removed.  Mother made a torch with rolled up newspaper, set it on fire and singed off the pin feathers.  

The chicken was cut into pieces, the legs, thighs and wings cut off the body.  The insides were taken out;  the liver and gizzard saved.   Cutting the gizzard and removing the sac of gravel and food was a delicate process--if you cut the sac the gizzard was ruined.  (No, I don't know why)  The wishbone was cut from the breast and the breast, back and neck separated.  There was a time when Suzie and I fought over the neck.

Mom's recipe for fried chicken.  Dip the chicken in flour, salt and pepper.  Brown in Crisco in an iron skillet.  Put it in the oven for 30-40 minutes.   She served those first pieces of spring chicken with boiled potatoes and home canned green beans from the cellar.

Those peeping, yellow puffballs I loved grew into fryers and hens.  The fryers had to be processed for the freezer (at the locker plant in town).   A long day of cleaning and cutting chickens.  I reluctantly participated in the various stages as I grew up.  First dipping the chicken in boiling water and removing the feathers and graduating to the rest of the steps.   I never had to cut off a head.

Beyond the fryers were the hens.  The hens that laid eggs that needed to be gathered in an enamel pail lined with straw.

At those two points in the lives of chickens, I really disliked them except of course, for dinner.

The Peterson Place

Janell,  you and Shirley were both born while we lived on the Yost place.  And it is the one on 51 by the AT&T tower.  The rest of us were born while home was the Peterson place.  I don't remember Sue or Mick being born but I was six when Bob came along and remember Grandma Gatewood staying with us at that time.   Dad came into the bedroom and told Sue and I we had a baby brother.  I asked if we could name him Bobby or Donnie.  I went to school the next morning and told the kids I had named my baby brother.  Joyce Steen said I didn't; parents named their children.  I do remember Mick as a baby in the bassinet in the living room.  Sue and I were playing around it and tipped it over.  Dad always told about looking up from the table and seeing Mick carrying the newborn Bob from the living room.  

I started school at Jefferson School with Mrs. Young as my teacher.  Or was it Miss?  She had taught Mother at Jefferson school.   The Smith's picked me and someone else up every morning.  One winter morning while I waited in the snow, beside the water pump.  I stuck my tongue on the pump handle.  I do not know why.  I heard the car coming up the hill and pulled away real fast.  I can still remember how it hurt.   Here's what I remember as my first day of school.  Mother drove me and waited beside the car while I walked up to that heavy door and went inside.  It may not have been my first day.  Mother said she probably had her wash in the car with Sue and Mick an would have been pregnant with Bob.

The windmill and the pump in front of the house provided the water for the house.  Mother or Dad would carry it into the house in a white enamel pail.  We had a matching dipper to drink from.  Yes we all drank from the same dipper.  The house had no running water and no bathroom.  There was an outhouse and a galvanized tub was brought in from the back porch for baths in the kitchen.

I remember  riding in a horse drawn wagon while Dad picked corn.  One side was higher than te other and he bounced the ears off that side.  I don't know if I got it by ears of corn.  I vaguely remember a lot of people butchering a pig.  I definitely remember the fatty"cracklings" Mother heated to get the cans of lard.  Then they were givie to Grandma Anderson for making lye soap.

One day Dad brought home two snowy white puppies, one for me and one for Suzie.  Apparently we could only keep one and one day mine was gone.  No explanation.  I think we named that dog Snowball.    I don't know if it was the one that bit Sue.  

I  got hit above the eye with a glass bottle.  Paul Dee was holding the bottle and told me to duck he was going to throw the bottle.  I didn't duck and the next thing I remember was laying on the kitchen table with wet cloths on my head.  

 

I remember both, Franty and Virgil visiting us in uniform.  It seemed to me they just appeared and stayed for a day or two and left again.  I knew they came from the war.  Grandma and Grandpa Gatewood would come to visit after they had been in Phoenix bringing grapefruit and oranges.   Grandpa had asthma and would burn a green powder called Asthmador.  We liked to "smoke" with Grandpa.   Julia, Harley, Delaine and Richard Gould would drive from Colorado for a visit.  Richard was always sick with asthma.   I  was digging in the dirt one time when Uncle Harley came by and asked if I was digging my way to China.  He told me I could.  I worked at it for a couple of days and then one night it rained and my very small hole to China filled with water and I lost interest.

Sometime after we left there, Eddie Peterson built himself a little house along the creek and tried to make a pond by building or having built a dam.  The beavers didn't like his dam and tore it down.   The Ethel and Eddie Peterson lived in Omaha.  Eddie needed a retreat.

There was a pond there for a while.    We no longer lived there when Dad tried to teach me to ice skate on Eddie's pond.  He could ice skate quite well and said if I could roller skate there was no reason why I couldn't ice skate.  Well I couldn't.