Now that I have chicken and ducks I feel a deep feeling of home, something I tried to find when I first moved out here and bought some chickens and ducks but the coyotes eat them all and so I never tried again.
We had once tried to dig a pond but couldn’t dig down any deeper than two feet so we gave up on that idea. The ground is so hard you need a jack hammer to break through, it’s crazy hard out here .
Some people told me I couldn’t make it here when I first bought this property and said I was a fool for buying this land, I would never be able to have any trees out here cause they wont grow. And I believed them for a while but life moves on and so my trees grow, even though I would let them get so dry each summer their leaves would dry up and fall off. I wouldn’t notice until it was too late but despite my neglect they kept on growing. Last year when my father was in the hospital I darn near killed them and I didn’t even noticed until this spring when they stayed brown sticks on top and everything turned green.
Now that I have my dads half dead plants, keeping them alive was a high priority for me and so my trees started to come back as well, they lost their new growth and I had to break the tops off but they where coming back.
Sitting watching my ducks swim around there pond is like magic to me. It’s still only a few feet deep. My neighbor bought a new tractor and wanted to play with his new toy so I asked him to just put some more dirt around the sides. I just ran a hose into it and filled it up. Now there is green grass starting to growing around it and my ducks love it. They have to run a few hundred feet across the drive to the pond from the coop, witch is a crack up to watch. I have runners and they can haul ass too, it makes me smile every time.
Now with every up side, there is a down. As happy as my new chicken and ducks have made me, I found my Rooster with all the skin on is back eaten off and his ass was missing. He was dying slowly. Nature is so cruel and I started to cry. I don’t know why I didn’t even like him that much, he had started to attack me and I’m guessing the dogs but I really didn’t want to kill this animal. Every time I would pick him up he would perk up, I could feel him holding on to life. I set him on the ground he would walk around like see I’m fine and I can do this only to fall down a few strides later. I have had to put many animals down through the years. Today I’m crying like a child.
All the memories of having to help Dad kill the chickens. I think the reason it was so traumatic for us was because the experience was traumatic for him as well. My dad was a softy, he really didn’t like killing them and tried to make it our chore but we didn’t want to and cried. My Dad hated when we cried. We did it finally but it was a big show down with lots of yelling. We had to learn how to kill it, clean it, pluck it and cook it, it was a matter of survival and so we did it, but it was short lived and we went back to buying our meat at the store.
I can remember when one of the roosters started to attack us kids and my dad got so mad he tried to catch it, it was quick and my dad couldn't catch is so he picked up a 2x4 and tried to kill it. I thought he had lost his mind swinging that board around, chasing that rooster all over the yard, the rooster still trying to fight with him then turn and run, my Dad finally got so mad he went to the neighbors and came back with a gun and shot it. I had never seen him that mad before. It kind of scared me to see him lose it like that, his long hair sweaty and flying around, he had lost his bandanna that tamed his wild black hair in the fight, his face was beat red and the look in his eye I never saw before. I had never seen him with a gun before and he knew how to use it too. It was a hole other side to my father I never saw before that day. I knew the story, when he shot himself in the knee before I was born. The story go’s he had broke his leg roller skating and was bored so he was practicing his fast drawing skills and shot himself in the other leg. The story just confirmed my father was a complete goof ball. He was such a dork sometime but it was comforting to know he would defend me, with everything he had, even from a rooster.
I stand here now looking down at this suffering animal and knowing I have to put it out of it’s misery and still I can’t. I just can’t. every time I grab it by the head it struggle to live. I don’t know why this hit me so hard? I leave the rooster to go feed the horses, maybe I will get up the courage when I get back.
Why can’t I kill it? it wasn’t long ago I had to put a baby sheep down, it was born deformed and would have starved to death in nature or eaten by a coyote. The natural world is harsh and unforgiving and I didn’t want to deal with this now.
I go feed the horses hoping is will die on it’s own but it didn’t. Crying like a little child I pick up the rooster and broke it’s neck, I took it into the house to clean and cook. I had forgotten how hard it is to cut off it’s legs, my knife wasn’t sharp enough, this was not working, he smells really bad and there are bite marks all over his back. I will skin it, seeing it’s half way there, and then make soup. I’m not crying anymore at least, with one leg off and feathers everywhere I’m over the thought of eating it, this thing really smells bad and I started to laugh at myself. I don’t want to eat this, what was I doing?
Death is a life altering experience to say the least, greif is unavoidable. We all grieve in this life and we all have to come to terms with death. It’s completely natural yet it feels so wrong, the cycle of life that we can not control. The intense pain you feel when losing someone you hold dear. A pain you can not control nor deny, it has it’s own time, it’s own power, I can only except there is purpose to this process, this process we all endure. I write these stories because they release my pain a little, I guess part of the process is to share our struggle.
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