Handy Tools, Chickens and Family Visits

Do you know what a chicken catcher is? I didn’t until last Saturday and now I’m the proud owner of my very own poultry catcher leg hook and, no, I don’t have any chickens to go with it. It’s a 4 1/2 foot long pole with a rubber handle at one end and a hook at the other, a fancy model compared to some I’ve since seen online. My niece and her husband live in a county south of me and they drove up to present me with my new prize. I’m pretty sure he made it, judging by the wood burnt label on the smooth wood because it matches the work on the walking canes that he makes and sells. They don’t keep chickens anymore but at one point in time they used to have a dozen chickens---each a different, fancy breed that laid various colors and sizes of eggs. But at least three of my brother’s grandchildren keep chickens. Chicken talk in the family amuses the heck out of me but we have the best deviled eggs and potato salads at parties. They didn’t grow up on farms but they are prime examples of a growing phenomenon of backyard and urban chicken hobbyists in their generation. There are five magazine publications on the market now devoted to raising backyard chickens!

So what am I going to do with my new tool? Hope I’ll never, ever have a need to use it but if I experience another power outage, the chicken catcher hook is the perfect tool to pull the manual override cord on my garage door. It’s such a simple concept and a solid solution for those of us with bad bones who don’t get on ladders. I got curious about how the tool works for the purpose it was invented and all the videos I found online are so quick you can’t really see what’s happening. But this description from UIUC Poultry Farms explains it: “What this tool does is it catches a chicken by its leg and because their legs bend forward (and not backwards like ours) their leg gets stuck. From there, I lifted it up and grabbed it by both of its legs. I was then told that the proper way to hold a chicken is by splitting my fingers into a live-long-and-prosper sign, then sliding that along the chicken's stomach. This allowed me to hold both of the chicken's feet as well as support its entire weight in my hand.” The guy who wrote that was learning how to catch and band chickens but I assume other people catch chickens to cook for dinner. That was one of my husband’s job as a kid growing up on a farm. I can’t even buy and prepare whole chickens from the grocery store without them remaining me of a living creature and that turns me off to eating them. I can’t imagine killing dinner with my bare hands. 

My niece is a grannie-nanny to her a four-and-a-half year old and a newborn. She, her husband and their daughter are all teachers---two of them retired, of course, but once a teacher always a teacher. They genuinely enjoy interacting with young people and I’ve come to believe that it’s also an art form that if I ever had it, I’ve lost it along the way to sprouting gray hair on my head. When I try to make conversation with little ones or pre-teens I feel like a sea lion preforming for a fish they never deliver. I didn't had that trouble relating to my nieces and nephew when they were growing up. Heck, I was still half kid myself. I was only twelve when the first one came into the family. 

Playing in my nieces and nephew’s fort in the woods, swimming, boating and fishing at the family cottage, snowmobiling, raking leaves, sleep-overs, planting gardens, walking country roads and me bugging them with my camera are some of my best memories. My brother thought I was spoiled because I wasn’t in the kitchen doing ‘women’s work’ before and after meals. Instead I was in charge of entertaining the kids. But who was I to question the wisdom of my mom who wanted us out from underfoot when serious meal preparation and clean up was under way? My mom and dad set great examples for how loving grandparents should interact with their grandkids and I like to think I set a good example for how aunts interact. However, I’m the official godmother to my oldest niece---and maybe my other niece, too, I can’t remember---I fell down on that job. Do godparents take that of roll of spiritual guide seriously? If so, I'm not dead yet. There's still time for that conversation. I'd probably quote something cryptic like Echart Tolle's, "You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself." Ya, I know what you're thinking. What was my brother and sister-in-law thinking when they picked me to be a godmother?

My niece and her husband and I had a wonderful, long visit. They helped me track down a problem I was having with my hot water return line since last week when all my pipes were drained during the power outage, then we went out for brunch and came back here to look through old photos. And, of course, I had a show-and-tell with the stuff I’ve bought for my upcoming bedroom redecorating project. Show-and-tells have always been one of my favorite activities and when you think about it, the blog world is full of writers and readers who also love them. ©