Chicken and Egg - Janice Cole [43]
I shook my head with a start. Why had I been daydreaming about working in a restaurant after all these years? And cutting apart chickens, of all things! In the past, I had been proud of my knowledge of chicken anatomy. It was the result of years of cutting apart chickens quickly and efficiently. I even taught classes in it. But on that morning I wished I was ignorant. The chicks were growing up and beginning to look like real chickens. My eyes still saw cute, adorable chicks, but my brain often instinctively registered drumsticks, thighs, breastbone, and wings. I knew right where to cut their legs apart, and the worst of it was, I actually thought about it.
I’d always said flippantly that I could easily become a vegetarian for moral reasons, but then I’d have to give up my day job. Now that I had chickens, I wondered just what kind of morals I had as I continued to throw family packs of chicken in my grocery cart and casually pounded chicken breasts and sautéed them until golden brown.
Maybe I moved so easily between chickens and chicken meat because the meat had been a part of my life a whole lot longer than the live chickens. Or because those featherless, anemic supermarket chickens didn’t seem to have anything in common with my cute, fluffy chicks, except for their parts. And that was beginning to bother me.
The brain has an incredible capacity to compartmentalize. We all do it all the time; it’s part of how we get through a bad day or the uncomfortable parts of our lives. Give a mind something else to focus on, and it will tuck away the inappropriate thought it was having. And it will forget those embarrassing moments, like the time you walked into a conference with toilet paper dragging behind, or asked an acquaintance when her baby was due and was told she wasn’t pregnant. Or the painful time you suffered with friends over the death of their child. For a split second, your brain will reach for the immediate and let your dreaded thoughts and hurtful memories slip under the table.
This was one of the reasons I’d come to love having chickens. They provided the immediate, the goofy, and the take-your-mind-away-from-serious-moral-dilemmas type of fun. All I needed to do was walk outside. It was my therapy.
As I headed toward the backyard, all three chicks came galloping eagerly toward me, as if on horses, and pulled up the reins about a yard from me. They were hoping for treats, but they also seemed genuinely pleased to see me. I couldn’t help but smile. When they saw my empty hands, it looked like they were going to gallop past me, but they stopped, swung off their saddles, and began grazing.
They scratched and pecked beneath the grass, occasionally stopping, standing on one foot, and looking around like short, dumpy flamingos. It always sent me into giggles. They were surprisingly good at balancing on their pencil-thin legs—better than most people I knew, with no wavering or quivering at all. Sometimes they’d stretch their foot out to the side as if to stretch out a kink, slowly flexing their toes.
As I stood there chuckling, Roxanne came closer and eagerly squatted down in front of me in an invitation to climb aboard. Not being a rooster, the offer didn’t interest me, but I picked her up and she seemed pleased enough with that. She snuggled her large body into my arms as I petted her and we walked around the yard. As we settled onto the garden bench, Petunia came strolling over, wanting in on the action. She jumped up next to me and the three of us sat side by side, watching the shadows of