Day Six: A Story About Chickens
For me, the freezer in the garage was a story – a big one
that cost me $25 at a time when $25 was a stretch. We’d had it for years, but
the top frosted over last Spring, and opening it was a circus act that required
my left arm to lift the lid and my head to support the now-detached lasagna
layers of lining while my right arm poked around in the dark.
I got really good at discerning the shape of frozen meat
last year, and I didn’t mind. As long as the freezer continued to keep our meat
frozen, I’d work around the usability because I liked the story of The Time We
Bought a Giant Freezer for $25. That’s me.
That’s not Matt. Matt prefers the story of The Freezer We
Can Use. He bought one from a place that would take the old one away. We just
needed to empty and thaw it, which I suppose makes for its own story of The
Time the Troy’s Stored Their Meat in Freezers All Around Town.
“What about these?” He asked, pointing to what remained – a
heap of meat in white bags in the bottom right corner.
“You mean the chicken carcasses?”
He looked at me, his eyes asking the question. Why?
“I’m going to boil them down into chicken broth.”
He kept looking at me. When?
“I’ll get around to it.”
The routine went: butcher chickens, organize meat in bags
according to chicken biology, and pile the carcasses in the nether corner of
the freezer to boil down for broth every two weeks. It’d worked every year
until … last. My quick estimate of the pile told me I’d made chicken broth
maybe three times in the last year. I still had 20 carcasses to go.
I knew it’d be a full year with returning to teaching
full-time, and I’d happily put off the tasks I didn’t like. Ironing went to the
dry cleaner. We hired a cleaning lady. But the chickens? Not the chickens! I
faced a binary choice – cling to the future hope of making chicken broth (and find
a freezer to store them) or throw them away. A or B, but it wasn’t so simple. I
think every woman reading this understands the layers, that what looks like a
question of logistics is really one about hopes and dreams – a battle of
expectations vs. reality and what I want vs. what is. There’s what I think I
can handle and what I really can handle, and the only thing I despise more than
that gap is having to look at it.
I looked down at the carcass pile. I sighed.
“I guess I’ll have to throw them out.”
“I’ll do it,” Matt offered.
He’s always a good guy; in that moment, he won VIP of Team Troy. It wasn’t until later I remembered that Matt doesn’t like chicken.
Feeling like you just busted into the middle of a conversation? Maybe you did. Let me take you to Day One of this series so you can begin at the beginning.
