Inside Nan: Today my Dad told me the story about the chickens....

To be fair, I asked him, to tell the story about the chickens. I remembered some about it and used my memory to help him remember. I call my elderly father (he lives in Michigan and will be 85 in June) every two weeks or so. Usually on a Sunday, and we talk until the batteries on my two cordless phones run out. This week I asked him about the chickens. This is what he told me. He and mom saw an ad in the paper that Little Brothers was giving away male chicks and they decided to go ahead take a box of 50 and raise them for chicken dinners. He built a coop on the back of the garage I remember a game we (there were only 3 of us then, my sister Janie, me and a baby boy, Timmy) had of running around and around the garage and climbing the coop and jumping off the roof, there were a couple of neighbor kids involved too - in the jumping off the roof game.... He made a little door into the garage so the chickens could go into a small partitioned area in there with a couple of light bulbs for warmth. He bought some chicken feed and fashioned a trough for the food. He put some water in a couple of bowls. And dumped the box of chicks in there. I asked him if any died. He said he didn't remember. He said he didn't remember to several of my questions. When they got big enough he began to kill them. I remember the foot-long, bloody piece of 2x4 and the hatchet. He just put their necks to the board and chopped off their heads. "They would run around the yard a bit", he said, "without their heads". He had a bucket of hot to boiling water ready, he plunged the body in there and then, holding it by the feet would pluck the feathers. "Took some effort but not too bad". He slit the belly and gutted the bird and then Mom baked it up for dinner.