Marilyn, Jimmy, and I were snatched from our home in Cincinnati and taken to the South after our mother beccame ill and couldn’t care for us. We grew up there with our father and our paternal grandparents, Big Papa and Granny. The following excerpt is written in my voice at age seven or eight:

     “The backyard down the steep steps is my favorite place to play when I’m home alone. The back is for gathering eggs, feeding the rabbits, picking green apples, gathering figs for preserves before the birds peck them apart or playing a game of ‘horse’ on the dusty basketball court. A couple times a year Big Papa shows up with one of Mr. Blanton’s horses to plow the garden to plant tomatoes, musk melons, beans, peas, and squash.

     Unless it’s killing day.  On that day my kind grandmother turns executioner to fill the freezer with hens and fryers.

     Some of the chickens are my pets, dyed bitties colored blue, green and pink I get for Easter.  They have names, but I don’t know which ones are mine after the colors wear off.

     When the water gets to boiling real fast under the wood fire, Granny goes out to the hen house to catch a squawking chicken.  After she runs one down with her apron blowing up to her waist, she sits by the fig tree and throws its neck ’round and ’round while that chicken flaps and claws and yells, blood flying everywhere.  When it gets good and still, she hangs the dead chicken on the clothes line, then one at a time sticks them in boiling water so the feathers are soft and easy to pull out.  “Donna, get your old clothes on and come help me pluck these chickens.”

     “Are you through with the killing?”

     “Yes, Baby.  I’ll put the step stool here so you can reach the clothes line.  Now grab me one of those fryers.”  Scalding chicken feathers is a smell you never forget.

     I view my granny different after that first killing in the backyard.