His, Hers, Theirs

This post is inspired by Jesse's mom, who got me thinking about chickens again.

"His, Hers, Theirs"

When the kids are all grown up and move out, parents must cope with the significant void left in their lives. With the convenience of internet shopping, my parents are learning to ease this inevitable burden of loneliness in their respective ways.

Mom buys shoes. Dad buys chickens.

Hers

Nordstrom is to fashion what Welp, Inc. is to chickens. An internet search on nordstrom.com for women’s shoes, specifically “pumps” yields four pages at 99 results per page—Kate Spade “Gracie” Slingbacks, Boutique 9s, Franco Sarto Platforms, Sam Edelman “Yorks,” Pedro Garcia “Elishas,” Enzo Anglioni “Starlites”… It’s stiletto heaven accented with sequins, rhinestones, satin, suede, buckles, zippers, bows, and faux snake skin.

One featured pair of shoes, the Beverly Feldman “Hottie” Pump—which sounds like a misnomer because names like “Beverly Feldman” should belong to the old ladies next door who crotchet afghan cushion covers and have 40 cats—offers the following helpful information: “An oversized, zipper-trimmed bow offers a unique touch to a peep-toe pump fashioned from animal-print calf hair. Stacked heel. Approx. heel height: 3 1/4". Calf hair and fabric upper/leather lining and sole. Imported. Salon Shoes.”As of right now, the shoe is priced at $235 and has no customer reviews.

Sifting through endless descriptions like these presents no challenge whatsoever to Mom. In the sleek world of Nordstrom’s website, with its aesthetically appealing abundance of white space, she feels perfectly at home. She can navigate the entire website in her sleep.

His

Welp, Inc. is a chick hatchery in Bancroft, Iowa. It’s like Nordstrom’s, except with chickens instead of shoes. Clicking on the link to Welp’s poultry catalog takes you to a menu of eleven different links, each with sub menus of their own.

You can buy various assortments of Cornish Rock Broilers, or twelve different egg layer types from Rhode Island Reds to California Whites. Black Minorcas and Silver Laced Wyandottes are only two of eleven different standard breeds (of which the Turkens, or “Naked Necks,” look most unfortunate, as their necks are bald, elongated rubber hoses).

You can order from an alphabetized list of 66 different rare and unusual breeds. You’ll see descriptions like, “Sultan Chicken - Hen weight-approx. 4 lbs. Introduced in Turkey. Features muffs and beards…feathered legs and 5 toes…May have problems with freezing crest feathers in cold weather. Poor forager, suited for close confinement. Calm, non-aggressive, easily handled. Small white egg” and read names like “Salmon Favorelle,” “Crevecoeur” (an uppity bird originating in Normandy, France) and “Egyptian Fayoumi.” Finally, Welp also sells numerous varieties of Bantams, turkeys, goslings, pheasants, guineas, and Chukar Partridges.

A bit overwhelming, yes?

Hers

Mom’s rule is: “Never Buy Anything Full Price. Wait For A Sale.” With the patience of Job, she has scored many a good deal by adhering to this mantra.

Case in point: the Betsey Johnson something or other pump. It was first spotted in a Nordstrom high heel display while vacationing in Anchorage, Alaska. Whipstitched Italian leather, 4 ½ inch spike heels, ¾ inch platform, leopard print inside lining, and electric pink soles. She eyed it, slipped it on, and paraded around in circles with as much lopsided grace and ease as is possible when only one side of you has the advantage of 4 ½ inches of extra height. The shoe cost $200 plus tax.

The package arrived in the post office six months later after Nordstrom’s annual fall sale. The shoes came tucked in the signature electric pink Betsey Johnson box, with the musky leather smell wafting out at the rustle of layers of crisp tissue.. Mom wore them to Hawaiian Day at work. I’m sure she sparkled amidst throngs of feet clad in white socks and Crocks or Nike tennis shoes.

I remember coming back from college in the summers to find shoe racks filled with wedges and ballet flats, and pointy, square, and round toed shoes. Red, black, navy blue, psychedellic zebra print. Where do you wear shoes like these in a town like Kotzebue, a place where so many roads are unpaved gravel that are either dusty or muddy? The road conditions don’t phase her. Luckily for Mom, we live on one of the paved roads. Work is a five minute walk down the street to the hospital, so she wears flats to work and switches to heels when she gets to her desk.

If the weather is favorable, she wears her heels on the sidewalk and you could hear click-clacking down the street before you’d see her. I’d watch for her out the kitchen window, coming home from the accounting department, for her lunch break. In a northern Alaska town of 3,500 people, she is the only one who wears bright floral print one-piece dresses, with matching heels, to work. It takes a considerable amount of confidence to stand out like this.

One day as I watched her walk home in a fitted purple and black hounds tooth dress with silver Chinese Laundry slingbacks, I wondered how it is that I, her daughter, comfortable in boys’ cargo shorts and plain t-shirts, could have no distinct fashion sense at all.

His

Dad is the bane of the post office staff’s existence because when his internet mail-ordered chicks arrive, nonstop buzzing and peeping and humming emanate from the holes in the egg-carton shaped boxes. A minimum order from Welp is three dozen, but they always send extras because in transit a handful of chicks usually dies of dehydration or stress. But what can you do? They’re only about $2 or $3 each. It’s not like breaking the heel of a Betsey Johnson pump. And besides, shipping is free. Feed is $50 per 50 pound bag and in one year, about six birds consume about six bags: one bag of barley, two bags of corn, three bags of pellets.

In the first batch of chickens from Welp in 2004, two-thirds were roosters that could only redeem themselves by producing a ruckus that drowned out the slurred epithets of the drunken neighbors across the street. However, after a few months, they were sacrificed for the good of the sober neighbors’ peace.

As happens in trial and error chicken farming, Dad learned that some chickens, such as the Cornish Rock, gain weight rather quickly and will eat themselves to death (much like the humans cited in Mary Roach’s Salon article (http://www.salon.com/health/col/roac/1999/12/03/roach/print.html) or die of heart failure if their food consumption is not restricted to a 12-hour eating schedule.

All but two of the rest of the brown egg laying types in the 2004 batch were pecking around in the yard, minding their own business when they were suddenly massacred by what remains, to this day, an unknown predator.

The survivors deserved a housing upgrade. So Dad erected an impenetrable pallet and super-strength chicken wire fortress. At first one of the chickens succeeded in escaping; she flew over the fence and discovered the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor called to report the chicken’s trespassing, whereupon only Dad could go and coax it back into its rightful pen; he added an extra layer to the fortress and earned the title “Chicken Whisperer.”

Of the two that lived through the massacre, only one is still alive now. She’s a Buff Brahma, the queen of the hen house, a feather duster with a head and legs. She is obviously quite hardy and her feathered toes have served her well through several winters of temperatures down to thirty-below.

Now Dad buys hens only—Cochins and Brahmas mainly, the chickens that best handle cold weather and look like they’re wearing little pants because they’re feathered from head to toe. They peck at melon and orange rinds, avocado peels, and apple cores in the summer. Like mothers who know the meanings of each register of babies’ cries, the Chicken Whisperer knows all the nuanced chicken voices—the contented chortling of eating, the angry squaking of rivalry, the strained clicking of distress—which he’s heard outside while working.

The Snowhens (Dad’s name for the chickens) would survive outside on their own in winter if it weren’t for snowdrifts. So when winter comes, Snowhens are shuttled from their outdoor yard pen into the “hen house,” Dad’s old tool shed, where they can lay eggs in wooden cubicles, nest in dry grass piles, and eat snow cones; by snow cones, I mean the snow that is shoveled into their water bucket, which is supposed to melt, but instead clumps together and forms a crusty shaved ice top. At the very beginning of winter, when the garden snow peas are just frozen, Dad throws those into their water bucket, a rare delicacy he calls “greensicles.” Without any other heating contraption—space heater, light bulbs, what have you, Snowhens roost, dormant, and most likely ailing of a chicken version of Seasonal Affective Disorder, dreaming of summer and variety.

Theirs

Chickens and shoes do not replace my parents’ children. Internet shopping is merely a hobby, a simple indulgence that keeps the monotony of life in a small town slightly more interesting when they no longer have their children at home to entertain them, and while they wait for their children to come home for the summer.