Eggs

I miss the chickens and roosters we had on the farm when I was a child. They woke me up in the morning as soon as the yellow sun turned the hillsides golden.

“Cock-o-doodle-doo, cluck-cluck-cluck” they cried out in harmony with bluebirds that had nests in mulberry trees.

There were so many birds on our farm. They woke me each day, singing a chorus of bird harmonies.

The chickens gave us eggs. Their eggs were as warm as the sunshine which had yet to fully rise in the hills of Appalachia in the morning- the time of day when we harvested eggs.

The chickens made cool pets. There were not as friendly as cats and dogs, but they were nifty to have around. They allowed us to take away their eggs before they hade been fertilized.

We ate so many eggs while growing up in the country.

In May, my grandmother, Esther allowed her favorite chicken ‘Sally’ to hatch a dozen or so eggs and raise some offspring.

“Let’s not take those eggs today. Let’s see if Sally can have pee-pees,” my grandmother instructed with a full basket of brown eggs dangling from her arm.

Chickens do not sit on their eggs all day long when they first decide to become mother hens. Mothers will sit only for an hour or so the first few days when there are only a handful of eggs in the nest. The hen knows not to give the developing yokes too much body heat until the entire nest is filled. That way, all the eggs will hatch at the same time.

It takes days for a good hen like Sally to lay a dozen eggs, but only moments for the rooster to fertilize them.

The breeding of new chicks made way for a few slaughters behind the barn when our bellies yearned for parsley roasted rooster.

One sunny May day, we chopped off the head of a rooster. It’s proper etiquette to use an axe and a tree stump for chicken beheading.

The rooster’s head fell to the ground, clearly sliced from behind its bright red beard.

It blinked at me as its body flew for its life.

When the body came down for a crash landing we threw it in boiling water to remove its feathers.

Then we cut out the guts.

Our rooster had eggs inside. Ether called it a hermaphrodite but cooked it and fed it to us anyway.