Lately, I’ve had the thought that I could have been a butcher.  I wonder why you don’t see many women butchers.   Is it a union thing?  I’ll have to ask one of the guys at the grocery store in town. I need to learn their names. Any French housewife or gourmet cook gets to know her local butcher and I don’t mean in the biblical sense.

I like deboning.  I deboned some chicken legs and thighs not too long ago.  I like the precision, the clean feel of chicken flesh, and the technique for turning an inexpensive cut of meat into tidy bundles for stuffing.  Farce, I think it’s called.  I felt like Julia Child.  She could talk and  cut up a chicken at the same time, on television, as a matter of fact.

​ There is a  cute food blog where the young woman in a small kitchen in Manhattan films herself cooking  while drunk.  That would not be a good idea if you decide to spatchcock the Thanksgiving bird.

 I really enjoy  spatchcocking.  This technique for splaying a fowl came to my attention  on several internet food sites as a speedy method for barbecuing the holiday bird. Several weeks before Thanksgiving I bought a six-pound capon  just to practice.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the right tools.  I needed a sharp clever and a mallet to make strong whacks through the backbone.  Instead, I resorted to vigorous sawing with  my serrated bread knife.  It worked, but the sawn backbone was rough along the edges. Also,  I needed a boning knife to cut around the edge of the breast bone, severing it from the rib cage.  I got it right on one side, but the other side  looked like a collapsed lung.

 “Spatchcock”  is an Irish term that means “dispatch the cock.”  I can see some medieval Irish housewife standing in the barnyard, declaring that the mean old bastard has to go, referring to an irascible  rooster who  outlived his usefulness.  “Dispatch the cock!” she declaimed with her arm raised.  I wonder if her husband shuddered in his rubber boots.

Admitting  how much I enjoyed spatchcocking a capon just for practice might make me seem like a figment of Stephen King’s imagination.  The truth is that being  a housewife  is getting on my nerves.  My family is gone.  My spouse is getting cranky.  I feel like  time is running out.   I need a new hobby.   I’m getting a wee bit peevish.
 
 

​
I am doing my best to stay away
from the neurotic, the lazy, and the
just plain crazy as they come in a cloud
(that cloud) of indignation, frustration,
paranoia, and just plain panic, wearing
angry red stripes or a self-righteous blue.

I am doing my best to fight the dread
of human touch--a squeeze, or a hug, 
a pat on the shoulder.  Signs of affection
send me in the opposite direction.
I closed the door, took up the welcome mat.
I’m in hibernation, waiting for vaccination.
                      That’s that.

Sobrina mia, this  woman, the activity director, she’s a crazy lady. Last Christmas she gave guns to the old men and baby dolls to the old women.  Si!  Verdad! The guns were plastic machine guns that shoot bubbles.    The dolls had heads como  melones,  blue eyes that followed you up and down the hallway,  soft white bodies, pink hands, and feet with tiny toes. Dios  mia!  They were girl Chuckie dolls! Dolls from the devil. The old men with guns  started shooting anyone who came into their rooms--the nurses who stick the catheters into their  wrinkled pinas; the pobrecitas who empty the bedpans.    Soon they were shooting their sons and daughters, cursing them for living.  When  one viejo  put the gun into his mouth and tried to  kill himself with bubbles, they  pumped his  stomach, took him to the ICU.    They took away the  bubble guns--pronto. The old women hated the  baby dolls.  They threw them on the floor.  Except one old lady.  She held it all day and all night. She sat in the hallway in her wheelchair until the day she died, holding her doll, crooning  to  the back of its bald head.  “ See my beautiful baby, rockabye beautiful baby.” The Chuckie doll grinned at us como la cabeza de la muerte.  Si!  Verdad!   A true story. Someday  I will take you to the janitor’s closet.  In the darkest corner you will see the crazy doll sitting on a wheelchair staring at you. None of us will touch it.

You may find it surprising, maybe  off-putting
when I tell you a favorite childhood recollection-- 
riding the gut sledge to the dump
a mile or so from the home ranch.
Hooked with a chain to a John Deere tractor,
the wooden sledge was piled with entrails,
 stomachs,  a mound of intestines,
 and a six-year old child in coveralls 
on the back of the  sledge,  dragging a stick in the dust,
my black and white  rat terrier trotting behind.

It might seem odd that I remember with fondness
watching the butchering of a beef for the ranch larder,
the way the hanging carcass seemed like a cave,
the blue, white, silver cavity cleaned with cold water,
The concentration of the hired hand, 
the sound of his knife on the whetstone,
Now I know what a privilege to be a participatant, 
even by watching, and to remember the blessing 
at my grandparents’ table: “Bless this food to our use,
 that it may nourish and strengthen our bodies.”









​

          No prison can hold me; no hand or leg irons or steel locks can shackle me.  No ropes or chains can keep me from my freedom.” Harry Houdini



​​​​​We were there the day Harry Houdini
bound himself in tons of chains and ropes.
 He waved to us, we cheered, and, last seen, he
sank into the cold unknown with all our hopes.

We gathered with  friends and naysayers, too,
murmured together, moved closer to know
more of the bind Harry put himself through,
yet feared to imagine the dangers  below.

When he rose from the depths, free from dire straits,
we breathed his relief as we would a brother’s, 
then we turned to go home dragging the weights
we wore to the shore and told each other

if Harry Houdini can beat the odds,
if Harry Houdini knows a few tricks,
if Harry Houdini can challenge the gods,
there’s always a way to get out of a fix.

 












​

​
    It matters not 
    what others see.
    I love the looks of me.
    Moo, moo, me, me.

Watch the restless swallows come and go
on the power line to Tuscarora.
Some avian law explains the way
birds leave space between one another.

Instinct decrees  distance between hawks
hunched on poles beside the Midas Road
and tells peregrine falcons  to nest 
at least two miles from other raptors.

What of the ranchers who inhabit
the range below?  From an eagle’s view
 above the plain, distance makes sense:
 what the high desert land can sustain.

 A question remains.  Does distance breed
 those disinclined to be near their kind? 
The trails of truck dust on country roads 
show the miles folks  go to help each other.

Not everyone is meant for this place.
Generations who stay find solace
in silence, comfort in kindred souls,
 God in the sunsets and the space.
 

​Something awful may
happen tomorrow.
Some terrible thing
may be waiting for
mourning.  Think on this:

The car you leave in
never arrives.  The
voices you hear are
whispering lies.  The
hankie you touch to
your lips fills with blood.

Think of the skull on
the mantle.  Ponder
Boethius et al.
Turn Terror away.
Make today quiet,
humorous and good.