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Easter

I hope you had a wonderful Easter.  Paul and I spent the morning reminiscing about Easters of our childhood and for today I thought I'd share parts of that discussion.

Paul grew up in a small town or as I would put it, in the city.  That means his contact with animals was quite different from my own.  He talks about walking to see the horses in a field not far from his home and this morning we talked about the baby chicks all brightly coloured he would get as a small child on Easter.  He remembers playing with them and within a very short time they would start sprouting feathers and as he put it, ¨The chicks then disappeared.¨  His hope is that they were taken to a local farm, but of course as a child he has no way of knowing what their fate was.


I grew up on a farm and for some reason this last week I was thinking about all the up close and personal experiences I had with animals at a young age.  Like watching my Dad frantically work to pull a calf from a cow with a rope because the birthing process was not going well.  (BTW both calf and cow ended up fine.) Or the time I didn't do a simple task of checking on the sows to see if any piglets were born.  We raised pigs outside and the sows would burrow a bowl into the ground to give birth.  It was my job to help insure the piglets wouldn't drown if it rained.  Once I didn't check and if I remember right five piglets drowned.  That is something that really sticks in your mind regarding responsibility when you are little.

But my all time favorites were the baby chicks.  About this time each year my folks would get approximate 200* or so baby chicks.  They were about a day old when we brought them home in cardboard boxes.  The chicks would immediately go into the brooder house, the structure used to keep chicks warm until they are big enough to go out into the world.  The brooder house contained the brooder (oh, really, you don't say).  I remember it being a big concave shaped metal hood with what I think was a gas burner at the top.  Here's a photo of one.



This one looks like it is a part of some Xmas decorations with only a handful of chicks.  Ours, if I remember properly sat is a small Quonset hut with all 200* chicks huddled to get under the heat.  And just for the record the diameter and height were both approximately 3.5 feet or 1 meter, making it seem big to a small person.  See that open hatch in the middle of the photo, that's where one would light the gas to get the structure heating.  Dad gave me a hatch just like it a few years ago.

As a small child I fit into the brooder house with the chicks very comfortably.  Back then I was able to sit on my hunches and play with the chicks for hours on end.  During that week when they remain fluffy I would spend all my free time with the chicks.  Even at that age I knew the time I liked them so much was that first week.  The building would be very warm, the chicks were very soft and no one would bother me.  I could be surrounded by these moving fluff balls without my brothers interrupting me.  So to commemorate all this Dad gave me the hatch, as a reminder of my time spent with those chicks.

So at Easter I never received a painted baby chick.  Farmers tend to avoid giving animals as gifts, perhaps because animals are seen more as assets, not forms of entertainment.  I had a whole flock of chicks to play with and this morning Paul and I discussed all of this.  And although the two of us have much in common, our first 18 years of life on this earth were in very different worlds.

Hope your memories of Easter past are as pleasant as mine.

*Mom says it was actually 500 chicks.




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