The Snowflake Chronicles

A Chicken with Its Head Off

14 Kalimat 163 B.E. – July 26, 2006 A.D.

I looked into the new session of Follow the Leader Journaling Contest today. It’s been a while since I looked into the contest. I entered the first session and enjoyed it, maybe I’ll enter the next session. Anyway, this one started Monday, July 24 and it ends Sunday, August 13. It’s Tuesday night now and I can’t sleep, so I though I’d catch up or do some reading that had nothing to do with course work. I read mood indigo’s entry and decided to write about the contest in my Poet999 blog and a revelation that come to me while I read oddly enough.

The next entry in the contest was Gloomy Member’s The Chicken is running Around Headless. I couldn’t resist reading it, the title brought back a lot of memories of my youth, not my childhood but my youth. You see my grandparents had chickens, so if chicken was in the menu I had to go out too the chicken coop, catch the bird and kill it myself. Which is one reason I don’t raise chickens today. I’m much happier going to the store and buying the creature already dead and dressed.

That’s one thing that always got me, when you go to pluck the feathers of a chicken or any other form of poultry, it’s called dressing the bird, but you’re not dressing it, in fact (at least technically) you’re undressing it, you’re taking the feathers off rather than putting them on. I’m rambling I was talking about chickens and my experience of removing their heads, so that I could dress them and cook them.

Let’s get one thing straight about me and chickens, you never want to see me slaughter a chicken. Now my grandfather could take a chicken by the head and with one jerk of his wrist snap the head completely off. I was never that talented. I had to use an axe, well actually a hatchet to remove the bird’s head. Even then it was a turmeric experience, for both myself and the bird. Needless to repeat, when I want to eat chicken, I go to the store, buy it already dressed, and ready to cook. And no I’m not going to describe me slaughtering the chicken, at least not in this entry.