Stayin' warm

The temperature took a dip last night. Even my heated birdbath has ice around the edge. When it gets cold, I’m always reminded of a story my grandmother told me when I was young . Apparently back in the day, it was normal for people to give baby chickens as Easter gifts. My mother received two in her Easter basket when she was five. They lived in the city so I have no idea what they planned to do with the chicks when they got bigger. One day my grandmother smelled something funny so she went to investigate. She found the two baby chicks “getting warm” in the oven. Needless to say, they didn’t survive and no more live pets were given to mom. My mother was a remarkable woman; remarkable in that she lived as long as she did considering some of the weird stuff she pulled. I have a million stories but I’ll only share one more. A few years after the baby chick incident, she and several of her playmates found a dead snake. The kids thought it would be great fun to put the dead snake in the mail box at the Twelve Oaks Christian Home for retired seniors. I don’t even want to guess what happened when someone went to pick up the mail. Fortunately the kids were seen, the village called my grandmother and my mother never played with dead snakes again. My grandmother had a way of assuring compliance that the Grand Inquisitioner would have envied. (I have grandmother stories, too.)

Even as an adult I was never able to figure out my mother’s brain processes; in the future I will share stories of the vinegar douche, the plucked rabbit and the dirty bullets – maybe if you're really good - the “cat house” and the Jewel T man story.