Chickenshed
Written: November 22, 2001
As most of my stories do, Chickenshed started out with just a strong image, like a Polaroid snapshot or a short movie clip. I'm old enough to have a small portion of my toddler years documented by the old Super 8 mm film reel and it was a reverent ritual when the box of film reels was trotted out, along with the long spring tensioned projector screen and the heavy iron projector. Those jittery, faded, amateur movies of my childhood are kind of what these images are like - usually no sound, their relevance punctuated by the age of the medium. Just a flash of emotion, nostalgia, concept.
I grew up on what was a working farm at one time, with many little barns and chicken coops surrounding a circle drive - the American Midwest version of a country courtyard. A chicken shed (two words is the correct way to write it but I just love when Microsoft Word tells me I'm wrong so my one word title stays out of spite) - a chicken shed is just a small wooden equivalent of a lean-to, at least ours was. You had to bend down to enter the shed through the small door and once in, you really couldn't straighten back up. The roof was slanted one way so that the taller wall had open windows with wooden shutters that would ventilate the shed during the summer months and keep the heat in during the winter. Chicken wire (of course) prevented the chickens from escape. On the back wall, the shorter of the two main walls, were the coops - nothing more than shelves of wooden partitions, each with a pile of straw tucked into the three sided cubicles. Now, I'm sure there were any number of ways to build chicken sheds but this was the kind that we had on our farm.
One winter, long after we had moved the chickens from the run-down little shed into the main barn (the shed was only a few years from being leveled, it was in such poor shape) we had a big snow-storm. The blizzard of 79. From sometime New Year's Eve through the main part of New Years Day, it snowed like a sun-of-a-bitch. Our one lane road, when it was finally plowed out, was like a long tunnel with ten to fifteen foot high walls of snow on either side. Total accumulation was something on the order of three feet (I may be exaggerating but I was a kid and kids are known to exaggerate a lot.) Many of the smaller barns were snowed in and the little chicken shed was nothing more than a big white lump, after the winds had their way with the powdery snow. My brothers and I set off one morning (schools were closed for over a week) to dig into the chicken shed and when we finally did clear a tunnel through to the door and weaseled our way inside it was the coolest thing - almost like being in an igloo. It wasn't entirely dark but it wasn't light either. And it was still. We were literally underneath a big pile of snow, sort of a snow cave but with wooden walls.
So, getting back to this story, my initial memories of the chicken shed is from that expedition so long ago. Only this time, the cave is figurative, a covering of dominance and submission instead of snow, but still a tunnel into another world. I hope I captured the stillness of the shed, the shelter from a Midwestern winter, and the gentle tug of giving up power to the one you love.
I hope you enjoy Chickenshed and don't hesitate to send feedback via toran29@yahoo.com.
Toran