Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver; Steven L. Hopp; Camille Kingsolver

Author:Barbara Kingsolver; Steven L. Hopp; Camille Kingsolver
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Sociology, Gardening, Social Science, Anecdotes, Appalachian Region, Food habits, Southern, General, Literary, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Organic, Country life, Rural, Farm life, Agriculture, Agriculture & Food
ISBN: 9780060852566
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-05-15T03:56:06.296067+00:00

Our turkeys were looking gorgeous after their awkward adolescent molt into adult plumage. Bourbon Reds are as handsome as it gets on the turkey runway, with chestnut-red bodies, white wings, and white-tipped tailfeathers. The boys weren’t crowing, of course, but this would be their only failing in the department of testosterone. We’d seen that show before. Prior to our move to Virginia I’d raised a few Bourbon Reds as a trial run, to see how we liked the breed before attempting to found a breeding flock. I’d gotten five poults and worried from day one about how I would ever reconcile their darling fuzzy heads with the season of Thanksgiving. But that summer, with the dawning of adolescent hormones, the cuteness problem had resolved itself, and how: four of my five birds turned out to be male. They forgot all about me, their former mom, and embarked on a months-long poultry frat party. Picture the classic turkey display, in which the male turkey spreads his colorful tail feathers in an impressive fan. Now picture that times four, continuing nonstop, month after month. The lone female spent the summer probably wishing she’d been born with the type of eyes that can roll. These guys meant to impress her or die trying. They shimmied their wing feathers with a sound like rustling taffeta, stretched their necks high in the air, and belted out a croaky gobble. Over and over and over. Our nearest neighbor down the road had called to ask, tentatively, “Um, I don’t mean to be nosy, but is your rooster sick?”

Many of us were relieved that year at harvest time, when our first turkey experiment reached its conclusion. By autumn the boys had begun to terrify Lily, who was six that year, by rushing at her gobbling when she entered the poultry yard to feed her chickens. In the beginning she’d lobbied to name the turkeys, which I nixed, but I relented later when I saw what she had in mind. She christened them Mr. Thanksgiving, Mr. Dinner, Mr. Sausage, and—in a wild first-grade culinary stretch—Sushi.

So we knew what we were in for now, as our new flock came of age. By midsummer all our April-born poultry were well settled in. Our poultry house is a century-old, tin-roofed grain barn with wire-screened sides covered by a lattice of weathered wood slats. We had remodeled the building by dividing it into two large rooms, separate nighttime roosting coops for chickens and turkeys (they don’t cohabit well), secure from predatory raccoons, possums, coyotes, owls, and large snakes. An entry room at the front of the building, with doors into both the coops, we used for storing grain and supplies. The chicken coop had a whole wall of laying boxes (Lily had high hopes), and a back door that opened directly to the outdoors—the chickens now ranged freely all over our yard during the day, and only had to be shut in at night. The turkey side had a hatch opening into a large, wire-enclosed outdoor run.

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