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Most people have vivid memories of certain events from childhood. What sticks in your mind? Pick one particularly strong memory and describe it in detail.
When I was about four years old, my family traveled from New Orleans to Byhalia, Mississippi, to visit my grandparents. At the time, they lived on a farm.
A four-year-old who lives in New Orleans doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to see farm animals up close; in fact, I didn’t see many animals of any kind up close. So walking through the pastures and staring at the cows and goats was kind of a big deal.
One morning, my mom, my sister, and I were eating breakfast outside, when a haughty rooster came strutting through the pasture gate. Of course I’d never seen a chicken with its head still attached, so this was quite a treat. We clucked at it and threw cereal for it to peck at and, in general, acted towards it the same way we would have acted with a dog.
Roosters are not dogs.
This particular rooster must not have taken kindly to our noises and cereal offerings; he was downright mad about them, in fact. How do I know? Because he strutted right up to my chair and started pecking my bare foot!
I don’t know if you’ve ever had a beak pounding on your sole, but I can tell you from experience that it hurts. It hurts a LOT.
I screamed and pulled my feet up on the chair, the same way some people do when they see a mouse in the kitchen, and I refused to climb down until the rooster, satisfied that his work was done, swaggered back into the pasture and through the field.
And that is why, until I was ten years old, I was afraid of chickens.
Write your answer in the comments before Wednesday, January 9.
