Farm-fresh eggs
Cheryl Unruh
Originally published 12:48 p.m., November 6, 2007
Updated 12:48 p.m., November 6, 2007
Some things don’t change. Take the smell of a chicken house, for example.
My experience is somewhat limited, but as far as I can tell, your average, everyday chicken house smells exactly the same now as it did, say, 30, 40 years ago.
So, that’s good, I think, in this rapidly spinning world, to find at least one thing that hasn’t changed since the Kennedy Administration.
On a warm Sunday afternoon in October, I took a drive through the country. I headed north on Burlingame Road, joined K-99 (already in progress), and took a right on K-170, and passed through Reading.
And then, as long as I was sort of in the neighborhood, I thought I’d try to find Jim and Marilyn Wallace’s farm near Lebo. They had invited me to drop by sometime to see all their animals.
I first met Jim and Marilyn at the Farmers Market early in the season. Marilyn wasn’t always there - she sold things at markets in other towns, but Jim usually showed up in Emporia to offer meat, eggs and jam.
After buying their ground buffalo and Marilyn’s fine apple pie jam on opening day, Jim’s pickup truck was always my first stop on Saturday mornings. It wasn’t just the food that made me drop by Jim’s table, I enjoyed our banter.
After I pulled into Wallace’s farmyard the other day, Marilyn welcomed me and gave me the promised animal tour.
I had already met Danny, the Royal Palm turkey, a few weeks earlier at the Howe House “A Step Back in Time” event. The Wallaces brought a petting zoo to Emporia that day.
“This is Opal and that’s Jasmine,” Marilyn said, pointing at individual goats in a fenced pasture.
It was beginning to sound like the old “Romper Room” TV show: “That’s Ruby and Spicy and Firefly. There’s Starlight and Robin and Willow and Brook and Cinnamon and Strawberry.”
At the Howe House event, I heard someone ask Marilyn how many animals they had. She had replied, “I wouldn’t know.” And now, at their farm, I could see how it would be nearly impossible to keep track of the number of critters they fed.
Guineas and cats, a dog, and a Muscovy duck and its ducklings wandered in the yard, but most of the animals and birds were confined.
In addition to meat goats, they had a pen of pygmy goats. There were ducks in one cage, and ring-necked doves in another. I met the shy lionhead rabbit. And I was stunned when I saw the red golden pheasants. Rich colors gleamed in their feathers: gold, crimson, green and purplish-blue – all so bright in the afternoon sunlight.
We stepped inside the chicken house.
Boy howdy, nothing works as well to evoke memories of a certain time and place as a particular smell or odor. And the Wallace’s chicken house did that for me.
There’s the chicken odor, of course, but when you combine that with straw and the smell of sun-warmed barn wood, well, I was in time-travel mode. It was as if I were a youngster on my grandmother’s farm, crossing the threshold into her shadowy chicken house.
And here, in the Wallace’s chicken house, we noticed some freshly-laid eggs, and I purchased a dozen of them with brown shells, just like the eggs that I pulled out from under Grandma’s chickens.
Another outbuilding held busy chicks, about 175 of them.
Those growing chickens will be on dinner plates before long. Raised for food, most of the chicks have already been spoken for by neighbors and friends.
Some things don’t change; chicken houses still smell like chicken houses and food still comes from the farm. And for a city girl like me, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of these things from time to time.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
• Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
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