Pioneer Woman

This is my mother:

My mom is Wonder Woman, just a little less color-coordinated. (Remember the pink wall? See picture here. Mom is now shaking her fist at me, convinced—wrongly—that I would eventually let that poor pink wall die. Sorry, Mom! I love you!) She also reads this blog, and often comments. She used to email me comments on the blog, but now she has learned how to comment directly. Go, Mom!

My mother is a woman of many titles: domestic violence survivor (before Dad entered the picture), daughter, sister (one of five), typist. Mother to moi, her only daughter, and Pedro, the Chihuahua (let’s not get into which one of us she loves most—it hurts my ego). Note: We did not name Pedro. He came that way.

She is also….

Homemaker:

She stayed home with me when I was a kid, had dinner on the table at 4:15 p.m. sharp, when Dad walked in the door, and cleaned the whole house, top to bottom, every week. She homeschooled me and drove me to lessons in flute and tennis and art and French and Latin and sewing and anything else deemed important or interesting at the moment. (I never took to sewing, and even with private lessons never managed to improve at what my mom deemed an important skill to learn. Funny thing is that she can’t sew either. It was always my father who sewed the elastics on my ballet shoes.) I will never, ever, ever be as productive as my mother.

and…

Endurer of endless joking:

One year, Dad and I bought Mom some chocolate-covered cherries for Christmas, convinced that they were her “favorite candies.” Wrong! Apparently, my grandmother was the one who liked them. Turns out they were Mom’s least favorite candies (well, we were only one word off). So, we’ve given her a box every year since then, as a joke. The first year Jesse and I were together, he was the one who brought the cherries. This past Christmas, we had to wait until a few days after Christmas to bring in “one more gift we forgot about!” so as to make sure she’d be surprised. Remind me to tell you about her “favorite song,” “The Yellow Submarine,” sometime… Oh, and there’s also her pink flamingo collection…

Pioneer

Now my aunt calls my mom, her only sister, a “pioneer woman.”

Bonus round: Here’s a picture of my aunt and my mom. I’ve been looking for an excuse to put this on the Internet ever since I found it a few months ago. I think it sums up something essential about our family; I’m just not exactly sure what it is.

For the past couple years now, Mom has been on this natural-stuff kick. Everything she eats is free-range, pastured, organic, or grown while Mozart softly played in the background. (I made that last one up.)

She’s been making her own dish soap. Her own bread. Her own laundry detergent. Her own dog food (for Pedro, previously mentioned). Last October, when Joannie and I went to West Virginia for a weekend visit, Mom gave me ingredients to make my own carpet powder. For Christmas, she gave me a kit to make natural hand lotion and lip gloss.

She wants to own a farm. With goats and chickens and fields, presumably for Pedro to frolic in, just before he comes in for a big meal of homemade dog food. Dad has put gardens in the backyard of their place in West Virginia for the past couple years. Mom supervises. Dad plants, waters, fertilizes (naturally, of course), harvests, composts, and so on.

Mom has yet to convince Dad—who himself grew up on a farm—that their golden years should be spent getting “back to the land.”

The other night, I heard about some bad weather in Florida, so I called Dad to make sure everyone was still alive and no one’s house blew away. They were fine. I asked Dad if they had been doing anything interesting. I figured he’d tell me about their adventures in raw milk and kombucha and fermented carrots.

“No, not much,” Dad said. Then he paused. “Well, we did go to a farm this weekend. Well, not really a farm. A backyard, with chickens.”

He then proceeded to inform me that my mother—my own mother—slaughtered innocent chickens who had been minding their own feathery business. Well, he corrected, she wouldn’t kill them, but she did gut them and pluck them and cut them up and everything else.

Excuse me? What?

Here’s the story. My parents, who may need a lesson in “How to Be Safe Online” and “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” saw an ad on Craigslist for a class in chicken slaughtering and butchering. A local couple would welcome folks to their backyard farm and then teach them the ins and outs of preparing a fresh chicken for Sunday dinner. The only catch was that they had twelve chickens that needed killing and preparing, and everyone who came to the class had to help until all the chickens were done.

“Guess who came to the class?” Dad asked.

I didn’t want to.

“Mom.” He started to laugh, uproariously. “Just Mom.”

And, of course, Dad, who had gone along to photograph the endeavor. So my mother and father ended up assisting this couple with the plucking of twelve chickens. In the process, Mom threw out her back and then spent the next two days in bed. (Of course no one thought to call and inform me that my mother had injured herself while gleefully tearing the feathers out of adorable little farm creatures.)

Photographic evidence below. WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES!

Before my mother got to them

This, the woman who never even spanked me hard enough for it to do much good.

She meant business, apparently. They let her take home all the feet for the chicken stock she makes.

So, there you have it. My mother. The pioneer woman. Chickens: Beware. At least, free-range, organic, pastured chickens beware. The rest of you: You’re off the hook.