Then she gathers ingredients for breakfast, based on what she grabs, I assume she’s making pancakes. She’s getting better with her cooking and baking. Even her bread making skills have vastly improved.
She throws the fridge open and stares inside for a minute before closing the door and stuffing her feet into her boots by the door and throwing on a sweatshirt.
“No eggs,” Mara says dryly. She opens the door then shuts it with a little extra force and heads to the barn. She shoveled a path to the barn yesterday but it already has six inches of snow again. I watch her walk into the barn with heavy footsteps like she’s purposely trying to smush the snow beneath her boots.
What crawled up her ass?
Dylan saunters down the stairs next still wearing his pajama pants but he threw on a thermal shirt first. Shortly after, Mara stomps back inside, kicking the snow off her boots on the door frame. She extracts five eggs from the front pocket of the sweatshirt and sets to work making breakfast. It’s then I notice the baseball hat she’s wearing is mine. It’s an olive greenOrvisfly fishing hat, and it looks like she even adjusted the strap at the back to fit her head.
Where did I leave that hat?
Oh well, not a battle I want to fight. I’ve got plenty of other hats. And if I’m honest, it looks better on her. Come to think of it, the sweatshirt she threw on is also mine. I don’t know why but I get a sick sense of pride seeing her in my clothes.
No, no you don’t. It’s annoying as fuck and she doesn’t look good in them.
My thoughts from this morning pop back into my head. That’s the lastthing I need right now.
After a very quiet breakfast I head to the barn to kill one of the chickens. We have some eggs incubating for chicks to replace the ones we eat this winter. Dylan hates this part of farm life so I do it without asking. Shooting a deer forty yards away is fine by him, but butchering the animals we raise makes him squeamish. It’s not like it’s a fun task, but it has to be done.
I think Dylan named all the chickens at one point, but I can’t keep track of them. All I know is the ones with yellow ribbons around their feet are the oldest which means they are the first to go.
I pick one up and take her over to the stump we use for splitting wood and grab the hatchet beside it. Holding the chicken against the flat surface of the stump, I position the blade of the hatchet above her neck to take aim.
Just as I raise the hatchet, I hear a voice over my shoulder. “Hey Jason, Dylan wants to know where—.”
Whack.
I bring the hatchet down smack dab in the middle of the chicken’s neck, severing its head from its body in the middle of her sentence. The body still fights me for a moment even after the head has fallen to the ground.
“Oh my god,” she cries behind me. When the chicken’s body goes limp I finally turn around to face her horrified expression. She looks from the dead chicken to me and back again. “That’s barbaric.”
It’s survival. But I don’t have the desire to persuade someone who will always be set in their ways.
“You couldn’t have waited until I was done asking you a question? God, what a shitty way to go.”
It’s quick and painless. What’s so shitty about that? Besides, it’s just a fucking chicken.
Maybe it’s the sad way she’s looking at the chicken carcass, but I take pity on her and lead her to the incubator in the chicken pen. We keep the barn pretty warm for the animals so the hens continue to lay eggs in the winter. I point to the incubator and dots start to connect in her clever mind.
“These eggs are going to hatch?” She asks while inspecting the machine and the eggs it contains. I nod. “That’s pretty cool. It’ll be fun seeing babychicks. How soon do you think they’ll hatch?”
I hold up one then two fingers.
One to two days.
She nods her understanding before looking at the eggs again. The childlike excitement on her face is pretty cute. I’ve grown so numb to what others consider out of the ordinary. Most people take their kids to a farm for a couple hours to pet and feed the animals. They don’t talk about what happens to the animals when they get old or how they come to be in the first place.
The little joy Mara found thinking about the chicks close to hatching was short lived when she realized she had to eat the hen I butchered for dinner. And even less thrilled when I sat her down to teach her how to pluck and clean a chicken. I don’t really give a fuck if she thinks it’s gross or depressing. But watching her face morph into pure anguish at the task of plucking feathers was pretty amusing.
At least she’s good entertainment.
Mara stomps around the rest of the day in a mood. She’s acting like a petulant teenager who didn’t get her way. I don’t know what’s different about today to put her in such a foul mood, but eating the hen for dinner didn’t help either.
Stubborn. Arrogant. Prissy princess.
She’s dancing on my last nerve with her sour attitude so I head back out to the shop after dinner to decompress with some metal work. When I’m not working on firearms, I still enjoy crafting and creating. Lately, I’ve been working on making light fixtures from whatever I have. Antlers are pretty popular and I know I can sell those in the spring after the snow melts. After a lot of shed hunting in the spring, I have quite a collection for chandeliers.
It’s a precise skill to wire the antlers and create pathways for the wires without compromising the structure. That’s the part that keeps my brain working. The creative part is designing the look of the chandeliers.
