Tillie's Chickens

The day Tillie's chickens got loose was a Saturday. The canteen had closed early and there was little or no traffic except for the ferry passengers. My mother and grandmother were playing gin rummy on the sunporch, my brothers were eel fishing somewhere up island, and I was deep into a new Nancy Drew Mystery when from out of nowhere, a cloud of chickens descended into the blackberry patch and commenced to shriek and cackle loud enough to wake the dead.

The noise woke the dogs and they rounded the corner from the back door at full speed and full volume, anxious to join in the melee. There were chickens in the thorny blackberry thicket, chickens on front lawn, chickens in the air and one lone, brave soul roosting suicidally high atop the flagpole.

“Good God Almighty!” I heard my grandmother shout from behind me, “It's an invasion! Jan! Ring Elsie and have her ring Tillie to come round up these filthy creatures!”

I will never forget the sight of my normally staid and well-grounded grandmother charging toward the blackberry patch with her apron flapping and shouting “Shoo! Scat!” at the top of her lungs while my mother held onto the doorjamb to keep upright and laughed herself to tears. Next on the scene was Uncle Willie, running across the road in his longjohns and denim overalls, wielding his trusty shotgun and yelling something about chicken for dinner.

“The ditch, Willie!” my grandmother yelled, “Mind the ditch!” but Willie only had eyes for the chickens and propelled by his own momentum, he raised the shotgun over his head and just before he reached the ditch, gave an almighty jump. It was, of course, to no avail and for several seconds he and the shotgun disappeared from view while a number of the chickens took flight. During the time it took him to climb out and shake off the mud, the ferry docked and a steady stream of traffic began winding its way past. The lead car, a station wagon with New York plates, perhaps unfamiliar with the habits of chickens, slammed on its brakes just as it reached our footbridge and ended up sideways on the dusty road, narrowly missing a particularly defiant chicken and grazing the guardrail. An untidy family of seven tumbled out like a can of worms and set off a torrent of protest from the cars behind.

“Willie!” Nana was yelling, “Put that fool thing down 'fore you shoot yer damn foot off! Ain't a gonna be no shootin' chickens in my yard when they's children about! Jeanette! Pull yourself together and git on that damn fool telephone!”

“No need,” my mother hollered back, “Yonder comes Tillie!”

And indeed, Tillie's rattletrap old pickup was careening down the steep gravel drive, backfiring with every bounce, spewing clouds of exhaust and spilling a trail of wooden chicken crates in its wake. Tillie herself was behind the wheel, wearing her signature pith helmet with attached veil, a corncob pipe clenched between her toothless gums.

“Look out, Alice!” I heard Uncle Willie shout, “She don't always stop where she's a mind to!”

Tillie, in her 70's at the time, was a formidable woman, the kind of woman the island folk were pleased to call “colorful”. She'd raised chickens for years and had recently taken on bee keeping, a decision that caused her neighbors some alarm and aroused an unhealthy curiosity in their children. She'd come into the world one-armed from some long forgotten birth defect and was known to be a shrewd businesswoman, as spry as a mountain goat and a devout atheist. My daddy had once said that in a community of people who prided themselves on their natural reticence with strangers, Tillie practiced an enviable economy of speech with everyone. She was not one to waste words.

I watched and listened as the pickup's uncertain brakes screeched to a stop just shy of the blackberry patch and Tillie emerged, a coffee can of chicken feed tucked under her elbow-less arm. Before she'd thrown the first handful of feed, the chickens were gathering around her in a cloudy haze of beaks and feathers and one by one, Nana and I caught them, my mother shoved them back into the wooden crates, and Uncle Willie toted the crates into the bed of the pickup.

The tourist children cheered.

When it was over, we were were dusty and feathery and everything smelled like a chicken coop but every last creature, save one, had been captured and crated.

“Tillie,” my grandmother said tiredly, “You swore you was gon' clip their wings.”

“Ain't had time,” Tillie scowled, climbed back into the ancient pickup and drove raggedly up the gravel driveway in a cloud of blue smoke. Nobody had noticed that the chicken on the flagpole hadn't fallen for the chickenfeed ruse. When she saw it, my grandmother hustled me inside and Uncle Willie got his chicken dinner after all.

False Friends

Maybe I was feeling more cynical than usual or was just tired or just couldn't take one more passive aggressive, saccachrine sweet post about coming together. Maybe I'd had all the hypocrisy I could stand for one day. Or maybe I didn't want to listen to one more word of preaching from one more holier-than-thou false friend. It had taken quite a long time to see it but I finally realized that her condescending can't-we-all-get-together crap was remarkably one sided. All those heartfelt, “Just my opnion” posts leaned sharply right but were so couched in civility that I'd been blinded, had envied her refusal to call a spade a spade, had thought she was a genuine peacemaker. She could, I now dismally understood, sling mud with the best of them and it wasn't pretty.

“Enough lectures on compassion and niceness and Mr. Rogers,” I say outloud and hit delete. I'll miss her music but not her moral superiority or her superficial charity.

It's always unsettling to confront an unpleasant truth but it's worse to find out you've been had.

There are people in the world who, for whatever their private reasons may be, intentionally keep you from knowing who they really are. You admire their sense of fairness, their oft expresed tolerance, their small and capital C christian values of kindness humility, and faith. You think they practice what they preach and are encouraged to follow their example and look for the good in people. And then one lazy afternoon, you stumble into their underneath and find it's mean spirited, two faced, and cruel.

I'm not naive or innocent enough to think that we all don't have a little of the hypocrite in us but I still want to believe that for most of us, our public face is not all that different from the one we see in the mirror. At least, I hope so.

Lights Out

“Being afraid of the dark at your age!” my mother said churlishly, “I won't have it.”

“At least I'm not afraid of a mouse!” I shot back with a defiance I didn't feel. I was eight.

She paled, her face twisting first into an ugly sneer and then a bitter smile, snapped off the lightswitch and slammed the bedroom door. I instantly pulled back the frayed curtains to let the light from the streetlamp in. Later, my daddy would come with a small cartoon figure nightlight, kiss me goodnight and remind me to be sure to unplug and tuck it under my pillow come morning.

“Just don't tell your mother,” he warned me.

“I hate her!” I whispered fiercely, not caring if the words hurt or made him angry, but he just stood at my bedroom door looking haggard, sad and defeated.

“Don't say that,” he told me quietly, “Your mother is terribly unhappy.”

“I don't care!” I muttered and turned on my side so I didn't have to see his face, “It's not my fault and I hate her!”

He sighed audibly but chose to say nothing more. The door closed with a soft click of the latch and I heard his footsteps on the stairs. It wasn't long before the familiar sounds of another one sided fight drifted up through the heat register. She screeched and wailed and threw things and eventually launched into one of her standard You don't love me and you ruined my life crying jags. I knew it all by heart and it ended just as it always did. The more he retreated into silence, the louder and more abusive she became until finally the front door slammed and the old station wagon pulled away. I retrieved the latch key from its hiding place, taped to the underside of the window sill, and quickly locked my door. It wasn't likely she'd be sober enough to bother with me again but unlike my daddy, I had no place to run and there wasn't any sense in taking chances. If she'd discovered the nightlight, there was no telling what fresh hell would follow so I kept myself awake until I heard her drunkenly navigate the stairs, turn out the lights and close her bedroom door. I'd had eight years to fine tune my hate and I never completely gave up the hope that one of those ugly nights she might trip and tumble down the stairs, maybe spend the night out cold in her own vomit, maybe even break her neck and die. Harsh thinking for an eight year old, I expect, but I'm not sure I completely understood the concept of death. I just wanted her gone and didn't much care about the details.

Looking back, I see this was one of my earliest lessons in how to provoke someone past their breaking point for no other reason than to force a reaction, any reaction. During my second marriage, the frustration and rage of dealing with an alcoholic with zero affect drove me right where my mother had gone so often. I screamed and howled and threatened and threw things with the same ferocity and utter lack of control and got precisely nowhere. Every. Single. Time.

A part of me became exactly what I despised. I also strongly suspect it explains the lack of compassion I've developed for victims since it's easier to blame them and conveniently bury the fact that it took me 13 years to get out of an abusive marriage.

I am frequently in awe of my own hypocrisy.

Barking Back

Judging from the sounds coming from the yard, the Hound of the Baskervilles is loose on the other side of the back fence.

Unintimidated, the little dachshund lets out a howl and flies off the back deck, racing at full speed toward the noise like a heat seeking missile. The small brown dog follows right behind him and the tiny one is at her heels. In a matter of seconds, the chilly, gray morning is a hotbed of chaos

with the hound baying on one side and my three presenting a unified front of protest on the other. They can't see each other, can't tell what they're up against, but nobody will back down or give a single inch of ground. I feel like there's a metaphor here, something about the current state of the country but it's only 6am and I'm fuzzy from lack of sleep. I can't quite put it together. Unlike the current state of the county, the hound's owner begins calling him about the time I start reining my three in and it isn't long before peace is restored. The sun is coming up by the time I get everyone fed and settled in and it being a Saturday, I crawl back into bed and naively hope for hour of oblivion.

I find facing what the country has become in just the last two weeks is demoralizing, exhausting, and unrelentingly oppressive. Any last shred of optimism I might have had is gone, replaced by a sorrow, an apprehension and a rage that go to my very core. I go to sleep in dread and wake up hopeless and have nightmares in between. I sign petitions, I regularly call and email my protests to those in power, I donate and march when I can. But no matter what I do, I can't seem to shake off this sense of disaster, this dull feeling of watching my country being systematically torn apart, dismantled in the name of profit by those in power.

Life, however, goes on. I go to work and the grocery store and the post office as if nothing has changed. I force myself to pick up my camera and find music. I tell myself it will get better, that it must get better. I spend a great deal of time willing myself to care. And I watch and listen to my three small dogs refuse to be out shouted or silenced by the bully behind the fence.

If they can be that brave, then surely so can I.

The Days of Avocado Green

When it comes to having amazing women friends, I am blessed, far more than I deserve.

My friend, Charli, who at various times has been a long haul truck driver, a plumber, a painter, a mechanic, a substance abuse counselor and a fork lift operator - plus being a full time wife, mother and musician – pulls a bright pink wrench out of her tool box, gives me a grin and settles in to connect my new gas stove. Because the old stove is from the days of avocade green and the new one is current, it's taken several trips to the home improvement store and quite a few hours of her time to finally juryrig a complicated series of adaptors and connectors and gas lines to make it work. But work it does and she steps away proudly. She never lost a single ounce of optimism over it, never even thought of admitting defeat. It's just how she is - capable,

smart, stubborn, unafraid to get dirty and innovative when she needs to be. She can change your oil, fix a computer, install a security light, repair a leaking water pipe, write and perform music, cook up a storm and babysit her grandkids all without raising a sweat.

In age, we are eight years apart, Charli and I. It's hardly enough to shake a stick at after sixty or so. She's from Texas, I'm from New England and yet we had such similar raising, that we clicked immediately despite some profound differences. She's a life long conservative, firmly but not blindly pro life and I'm considered a a liberal, which in Louisiana means malcontented, leftist agitator. We are both thoroughly and irrevocably shamed and disgusted by current politics. We share a deep love of music and animals, a dedication to living one day at a time as best we can

and a spiritual connection to something but not necessarily a capital G god. Neither of us has been inside a church in years and the evangelicals leave a bad taste in both our mouths. We both struggle with control issues and have no tolerance whatsoever for stupidity, organized religion, hypocrisy, or alcohol. There's a bit of the rescuer in us both, a fragile need to be needed and useful. I envy her elegant self sufficiency. She envies my acrylic fingernails.

How can you not love someone who remembers avocado green appliances?