Every month or so when I was a kid, we would visit my grandparents on their farm. That was pretty much the extent of my experience with rural living.I wasn't expected to do any chores, but occasionally I would volunteer to throw corn cobs to the pigs. (AT the pigs, really, if no one was looking; They were such inviting targets, and they squealed like crazy if you landed a good one.)
Like most of the other grandkids, I thought of the farm primarily as a playground - a stinky, dangerous playground. Where else, in the course of a simple game of hide-and-seek, could we encounter barbed wire, pitchforks, heavy machinery AND crusty green cowpies?
One of my clearest farm-related memories involves a headless chicken.
I must have been fairly young. I was out behind the farmhouse with my grandfather, who was carrying a live chicken by its neck. With no warning, he held it firmly on a block of wood and took off its head with one whack of a hatchet. The bird's winds flapped wildly as my grandfather let it loose to run in frantic, frightening loops for ten or fifteen seconds before collapsing.
I don't remember what we had for dinner that night.
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