She was referring to the next day's (last Tuesday, Nov 24) butchering task, which Alida, our confirmed chicken aficionado, was probably telling her about. Truly I was apprehensive myself about the possibility of getting done before dark with how short the days have become. Several people had mentioned they might lend a hand, but one never knows exactly how that will turn out...things come up that take people away, and not all help is created equal! Also, if there is an opportunity to teach, I usually take the time. However, I was hopeful because Janelle's Dad and Tala were part of the volunteer crew, and they had both already proven themselves as Actually Helpful, with good sticktoitiveness.
When Alida and Terah started hanging around, I presumed I might get some plucking help, then off they would dash for more interesting activities. Alida came first, and while it took a moment to work up the courage to get her fingers immersed in wet feathers, once she acclimated she was off and running, and began challenging herself to get the whole bird plucked before I returned after getting the next one killed and draining. By the time she switched to helping with evisceration (something I did not expect out of her day), she was, with the exception of a few pinfeathers, sometimes succeeding! My day started to feel a little more spacious.
Tala was on hand at some point and stuck around as long as she could, and she and Alida zeroed in on the evisceration. I had taught this to Tala in September...this time she taught Alida. Magic! I didn't realize September was a "Train the Trainer" event (wink!). Alida's native curiosity has been focused on chickens recently, and I guess that extended to the interior. She's quick with her hands (and her mind), and seemed to pick up the gutting tasks with ease. Plus, her 9-year-old hands are just the right size! It was a lovely sight for this chicken-nerd dad. She was proud of herself, and I think that was proper.
Terah stuck to plucking, but with an age-appropriate gumption that matched her sister's. I laid a scalded chicken on the concrete for her to work on, and did she ever work on it! A few minutes and it was ready for a little adult touch-up, then evisceration. So I gave her another, and she made relatively short work of that one, too, creating a sizable mound of feathers. As she was busily flinging yet another handful onto the heap, she burst out, "This is like a feather festival!" Kids on a farm: my favorite Muse! We're not doing chicken butchering days at Tangly Woods anymore, folks. No, no. We are putting on Feather Festivals!
That evening I stashed all 31 birds (I added one to the count that morning) in my sister's extra fridge for aging, and planned to break down the carcasses on Friday. But I was under strict instructions not to forget to tell Alida and Terah when I was doing that because they wanted to HELP! This became slightly complicated when Friday rolled around and they were still at Em and Jonas's. I put it off by a day. Saturday came, and the kids had still not come home. Sunday, then, anyone? Five days is not too long for the aging of heritage poultry (aging tenderizes poultry and improves flavor), but I dearly hoped I would not have postponed the cutting-up day for the sake of eager helpers only to have them bop in once or twice but otherwise do their own thing.
I was not disappointed. Teaching Alida to break down a bird was pretty fun, she was great at it, and by the end we were switching for every other bird and there was nothing really for me to do on her turns but watch her work. Which was a pleasure to match Tuesday's! Terah, at 5, couldn't tackle a whole carcass, but when she asked about helping chunk up breast fillets from old laying hens that was going to be ground as sausage meat, I figured her veggie cutting skills developed this summer had earned her the chance to try if that's what she wanted. She did great, of course. I now feel confident that our younger kids, 9 and 5, could pull off breaking a chicken carcass down into usable pieces between the two of them without further guidance. Exclamation points. (!!!!!!!!!,!!!!!)
We finished the day out by grinding (Terah helped a lot with that) and spicing the sausage meat, then freezing it in 2 oz. patties. It was 27 1/2 pounds of it! That's 220 patties. We should have a lot of great breakfasts out of that. My bedtime snack at 11:00 was the 1.6 oz. leftover patty. It's never better than when perfectly fresh. Yes, it was a long day.
The next day we vacuum-sealed the frozen patties. Measuring and zipping off bags from the roll, heat sealing and filling, then vacuum/heat sealing the other end for a tidy freezer pack...what kid wouldn't want to be right in the middle of that, pushing all those meaningful buttons, initiating all those time-sensitive processes with variations in texture, temperature, shape, and color? Opportunities to get it wrong and fix the error, balanced by lots of times of getting it right. Building upon lessons learned from packaging the breast fillets and bone-in parts from the day before. These are kids on whom opportunities for education are not, or not always, wasted. Knowing how to learn: the most important lesson. And the rewards are natural when we reach into the freezer once per week or so for another round of nutritious, scrumptious sausage to fry up for brunch. The ends of the circle will close this spring when it's time to cuddle the freshly hatched fuzzballs of 2021.
These kids know how to adore animals. They know what it means to treat them well. They can judge the health of the animals and they see us adjusting care as needed. They know what a merciful end to a farm animal's life looks like. They are sad but not afraid, and they know what to do with the body to make good use of it. And they are ready to do it all again. I feel gratitude for this, and a sense that something industrial culture has taken from most of us has been restored, at least for these precious few.
So: Thirty in a day? Alone, I would have been hard-pressed. With this good help, we did 31 with time to spare.
On an unrelated note, readers might be intrigued to know that I recently attended (online) the annual meeting of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is "A Quaker Lobby in the Public Interest." Why should I, a non-Quaker, have done such a thing?
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Years ago, a friend or relative (who shall remain nameless because I can't remember who it was), upon hearing us yearning for a political perspective that was principled and non-partisan, passed us some literature from FCNL. You know how reading something is sometimes like taking your first deep breath in a long time?
So we've been on their mailing list since about that time, and have now been supporting FCNL financially for a few years. This is partly simply a response to the merits of their work, which there are aplenty, and partly an outlet for the mandate we hear repeatedly from folks both here and around the world who are on the receiving end of some of the worst injustices our civilization produces, who when asked by privileged U.S. citizens, "What can we do to help?" so often respond with, "Use your voice as a citizen to get your country to change its policies!" FCNL fills that role week-in, week-out, and is also a scaffold for persons of good will who are ready to make that good will heard by the powerful. In other words, if you want to exercise your rights as a citizen to talk with your elected representatives about priorities you care about but you don't know where to start, get in touch with FCNL.
I've been toying with the idea of joining one of their lobby days for a few years, but the online format this year for their Annual Meeting made it more of an opportunity, so I took the plunge. Four days' worth of conference-style gathering with Friends made for what I've been calling a "sanity spa." Not that Friends don't have their issues with, for example, a legacy of White predominance in their ranks, but they are meaningfully working at their issues in their refreshingly plainspoken and practical way, and the preeminent impression I came away with was of a deeply intelligent, aware, and caring religious body with a functional moral compass. One could be forgiven for having taken that sort of creature for extinct. I really needed that contact.
The days culminated in a lobbying day in which I was a warm body on the line for most of two visits with aides for Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, then was one of two folks who met directly with Ben Cline. Our organized ask for the day was the cosponsoring and promotion of the "Justice in Policing Act." Not that I feel this law would solve all the issues with or history of policing, but it contains some definite improvements and for the circumstance I thought it reasonable to support that effort. I hoped dabbling in lobbying would a) help me discern whether it is something I am up for in an ongoing way, and b) give me the familiarity to pursue it further if I decided to. It succeeded on both counts.
The results:
A) Discernment: I don't enjoy lobbying especially. It is not energizing for me to meet with representatives to try to get laws passed, repealed, or what-have-you. But I see the value in it in the real world; I see that if the squeaky wheel is going to get the grease then it might be worth sometimes "squeaking out" for what I believe in even if I don't like to very much. I'm a big boy...I can do hard things! Clearly if I did it often I would soon lose my will to live, but I can do some of it if for no other reason than to carry out the wishes of the aforementioned friends who asked me to do exactly this.
B) Familiarity: It's not technically that hard, but having experts around lends confidence, and borrowing from their savvy about what to advocate for and when may catalyze important changes faster.
I was heartened to participate in a session in which the FCNL Theory of Change project was discussed. In that time it was clear that some folks there are thinking beyond pulling the available political levers in timely and wise ways, and considering how the culture itself, of which the representative government is purported to be a reflection (I think there are reasons to be dubious here), might be moved towards truth. This is where I started to really perk up, which was telling. To me, cultures are changed in a million ways, but relationships and the arts stand out to me as typical vectors. Right up my alley!
What encouraged me most from the time, however, is that this organization succeeds in genuinely embodying the Quaker value of heeding "that of God" in each person, while holding forth a high moral standard to the powerful. For FCNL, respecting the value of each individual is not a mealy-mouthed excuse to back off from saying what must be said. FCNL has a policy and habit of entering respectful dialogue with legislators and others in government, and highlighting more compassionate and equitable paths forward in a disciplined way. May I be infected with a good dose of this ethos!
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