Daily Archives: February 15, 2018

Schmaltz

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A few nights ago, some critter got our chickens.  The coop latches had been chewed off, the door pulled down. 

Bobcats are neat and artistic in their massacres. Coyotes: they take everything.   But here, two Buff Orpingtons lay dead in an area of matted grass and strewn feathers. A third bird was gone entirely.  So probably a raccoon which kills for the killing sake.

I grabbed the two dead hens and carried them into the kitchen. Years ago, a neighbor had killed an orphaned raven that I’d been raising.  I was away at the time and the house sitter had buried the bird carcass in the desert. A dear friend – an omnivore woodsman from rural Maine – lamented that “it was a terrible waste of perfectly good protein.”

So, that evening I go about the dirty business.  I set a pot of water on the stove on a medium heat.  I dunk the birds in the water. Again and again. And again until the feather’s slip from the flesh as if from butter.

I strip all the down from the body, revealing the teeth marks and contusions. The birds had been savaged until their necks had snapped.

I severed the heads with a cleaver and then incised the rumps and reached in and removed the gray feces filled intestines, the ruby heart and livers wedded in deep yellow orbs of fat. It smelled distasteful and putrid.  

The gathered fat, an unearthly gold, was a different matter.  I would render it slowly at low temperature into that delicacy which generations of itinerant and dispossessed would call “schmaltz” — the ignominious word for that crucial ingredient in chicken soup that may perhaps make you well, and that thing that lends the crisp to latkes.  It’s that thing that can only be extracted from a bird that has known a real life; that thing which at the very least gives meaning to death.  

These sentient creatures loved to explore our home and sit on our porch.  What more can I do than to ensure that their being will in some way become a part of me and that it will matter?

 

American Empire

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Yesterday afternoon, I disassembled our deep amber American Empire bed.  In a few weeks I will drive it to San Diego.  

My wife’s family hails from Texas, part of the original Texas Five Hundred.  When we first met thirty years ago, she spoke wistfully about her house growing up – the old wooden furniture, the strange objects and curios repurposed by her parents.  But her family had dissolved and the furniture had been cast to various storage lockers and garages of relatives and strangers.  

I dreamt that one day we would rebuild that life for her, that we would bring that furniture together in a some grand house, and appoint that space with her childhood memories and somehow make her life whole again.  

Which over time we did.  The last couple bits, including this ancient bed from East Texas — the bed, we imagined, of her great grandmother and the bed of her parents came to find it’s home in Sebastopol. We fit it with an organic latex mattress.  And now life, I thought, could once again be whole.

Except not so much.  The headboard was too tall and would not fit in any room except that master bed. But the  bed itself was small – more narrow than a full, and of such insufficient length that it betrayed how height deprived our ancestors truly were.  When our dog jumped in the bed, we were truly squished.

And now we’ve come to abandon our house, making room for a family that lost their own home to the Sonoma fires.  We are clearing our home of detritus, of those things – all those things – that don’t work.  The new family is coming with their own king sized mattress. And so one afternoon I call my wife at work.  “I think we should get rid of the bed,” I tell her.

Get rid of it, she answers.  Her family failed to survive an alcoholic father and the suicide of her mother.  I look at this American Empire, and I think, some things can’t ever, in all their undoing, be reconstituted. The only thing left, well, is to seize the future and make life new again.  

And perhaps, that is what that bed was meant to be.