Monday, June 6, 2011

Family (Continued)

Chickens

Growing up on 16th Avenue, mom raised chickens in our backyard.  Our house was  a block from Providence Hospital near the current entrance to their parking garage.  She acquired a small flock of chickens, roughly 15 to 20 hens and a rooster, that inhabited a broke-down trailer, dad purchased and she coverted into a coop. Her intent was to have fresh eggs and to provide the family with roast, fried or adobo chicken when the occasion demanded.

Louise, grew up in Ferndale, Washington, midway between Bellingham and Vancouver, B.C.   She was the third daughter of Herman and Josephine Smith.  They had one son, Tom and four daughters, Margaret (Toots), Mary, mom and Jean. 

Herman met and married Josephine Gegg in St. Louis in the late 1800s.  She worked in a rooming house in St. Louis.  She’d grown up in Weingarten, Missouri near St. Genevieve on the banks of the Mississippi.  Weingarten housed a large German community that immigrate around the 1830’s. They’d come from Baden Baden and Offenburg and upriver via New Orleans to settle and farm. 

St. Genevieve, the first French settlement on the west bank of the river, provide great farmland surrounding it.  A Catholic enclave, these German Catholics found comfort in the religion and familiarity of living adjacent to the French.  Leaving an area near Strassburg, they came attracted to the principles of  liberty and equality espoused by America.

At the turn of the century, Grandpa Herman convinced Josephine to move west.   The family landed first in Joseph, Oregon, a pimary terminus on the Oregon Trail.  They came by train.   They continued on  to Portland before he moved further north to labor in the Aberdeen shipyards.  Grandma Josephine and the growing family followed.  I’d heard he’d also worked in Alaska during this time, likely in the fishing industry as he pursued his American dream. 

Grandpa moved the family to Bellingham where he entered the construction industry.  He built homes and even worked on the historic Roder House.  Several small houses remain as testament to his craftsmanship. Unsatisfied with U.S policy and fearing a war, he splurged and purchased a 15 acre dairy farm in Ferndale around 1900 on the Mt. Vernon Road near Cherry Point.   He thought this would be a way to feed his growing family.  Once again the family moved  to pioneer a new land.

Grandp Herman wasn’t the easiest.   English and Irish descent, his reed-thin build matched his miniscule temper and tolerance.  He was the definitive “spare the rod, spoil the child guy”.  The farm needed many boulders removed. Without money or workmen, the girls absorbed this main role.  Needing to blow the rocks and level the land, he ordered mom to bring home a case of dynamite after school on the school-bus.  Obediently, she did under “or else” directions.  The daughters gathered the stone fragments and cleared the land for pasture, replacing the workhorses he lacked.

Grandma oversaw the house, the cooking, cleaning, chickens and ducks.  She also helped in the pasture and feeding the cows.  A large chicken coop was built along with a machine shop and a tool shed. 

On the farm,  mom quickly absorbed the lessons in the care, feeding and dispatching of chickens.  This knowledge carried to with her to Seattle, as they roamed free in our backyard until she wanted one for the pot.  She’d cuddle it before snapping or axing its neck then de-feathering it for our meal of fried chicken or sinygon. She had her favorites and, I believe, each was difficult to kill.  In her final years in Rainier Valley, a neighbor's pet rooster  climbed the fence to roam her backyard.   Mom sat in her wheelchair whispering and cuddling that rooster like a baby.  She feed it grain and talk with it as it it were a long lost child.  When she moved into her adult family apartment, she’d ask about “her rooster”
always hoping for one more touch.

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