Sunday, April 27, 2008

Chickens


My kitchen is full of chickens! In fact, I've told friends and family, "Please, no more chickens!" I don't have room for any more! I do like chickens and I think they've decorated my kitchen quite nicely. Let me tell you about some of them and then I'll end with a story from my childhood. You can click on the pictures to bring them up close. The framed outline of a chicken is very old from my dad's family. They are holes punched into a piece of sheet metal. The little black and white chickens in front of the fence are from Paraguay. The fence was from Jessica. The picture on the right is a photo of the homesteaded farm in Iowa that is still in our family! It has chickens pecking around the yard. The big chicken on the right is from Lorraine! Everybody needs a stuffed chicken! The large mug has chickens on the sides and is full of love notes that I wrote to Jerry on one of my trips to Washington when I visited my mom lived there! I hid the notes all over in the most unlikely places so he was always surprised when he came upon one! I didn't want him to forget me!


These are shelves beside my kitchen window. The top shelf has a pair of black and white from a friend, Dawn. They had belonged to her grandma. She didn't know what to do with them and her daughter, Leah, said, "Miss Anita has chickens in her kitchen, let's give them to her!" The pink chicken in the back on the lower shelf is from Haleigh. Four are napkin holders. The little pink one is antique. The one on the right has a place for a picture so Lorraine and Bella are in the picture when she came to visit and Bella was just a baby! The next one is a croqueted one. When I was little we had them to cover boiled eggs and keep them warm for breakfast. The pink one is from Tyler. He insisted the family go to McDonald's for supper so he could buy a chicken. He didn't say what it was for but when they came home he came running over and asked if I needed another chicken! I said, "Sure, I can always use another one!" Then he brought this one out from behind his back! A surprise for Grandma!
The red wallhanging is hand made from Paraguay. The white and red hen was my mom's timer.
I have so many chickens I also have them lined up on top of my cupboards in the kitchen. Most of them have been given to me, several by my mom.
The one in the bottom left hand corner, my mom gave to me. The two up in the corner, in front of the plate, were given to me by a friend of my mom. The friend is in her late eighties or early nineties and the chickens had belonged to her mother! I promised to take good care of them!
These were gifts. These are milk glass, some we bought, some were gifts. I left the end of the curtain valance showing because it's covered with brown hens! These chickens always make me think back to when my family lived in Oklahoma in 1946-48. We barely had enough money to get by. My dad was an evengelist so he traveled most of the time. To give us meat to eat my mom raised chickens and rabbits. We put a fence around our back yard and bought 100 baby chicks - all roosters. Well...all but one...99 roosters and one hen. Of course we didn't know one was a hen until they grew up and suddenly eggs began to appear! One egg everyday, except Sundays! We all laughed and said we had a Christian hen because she refused to work on Sunday! Around the corner and behind us lived an old couple who had a nice garden in their backyard. It came right beside our chicken fence! When the chickens got big enough to fly they did! They flew up on the top of the fence and down into the neighbors garden! That poor old man would get so mad at them! My mom felt bad but didn't know what to do until one day she had an idea! Our pastor came over to help her butcher some of the roosters, and we all helped clean them by taking the feathers off, etc. When she was all done cutting them up she put two in a bag and went to visit the neighbors! They were very surprised to see her, but even more surprised when she handed them the two chickens ready to be cooked! We never heard the neighbor yell at our chickens again! Lord, I have such good memories from my childhood, even though we didn't have much money, we had lots of love! Most of all, we had the love of Jesus. Thank you for my heritage.



1 comment:

ruth said...

I used to have a collection of pigs...I didn't really plan on collecting them but once word got out pigs starting coming from everywhere and everyone:). At this point I've kind of cleared them out but it is fun to collect something especially when their are stories and memories that go with each one.
Ruth