Cleaning Out The Chicken Coops

Cleaning Out The Chicken Coops

I was a runt and sickly for the first six years of my life. Rheumatic
Fever at five kept me down for almost a year, with fevers so high that
I lost all my hair. My hair was straight and cotton white. Grandpa
called me cotton top. When it grew back it was blond and naturally
curly. After I got over that sickness things changed and I got
stronger, and stronger, but I was still a shrimp.

Being a shrimp comes with perks, you get to do stuff that nobody else
can do. Like take a short handled hoe, lay on your belly, stick your
head and shoulders in the chicken coop and drag the hoe toward you,
cleaning the coop of droppings. Daddy built these coops like long
skinney boxes. Cleaning them would have been easier with a door on each
end.

The younger chickens lived in a pen and slept in the coops at night.
They had to stay penned up until they knew where they lived and didn't
wander off. Chickens are not very smart, but they are real nasty. You
have to keep the coops clean or the chickens will get sick, get mites,
or lice, or maybe even die. Apparently this stuff dosen't hurt
shrimp.

Well I must have a real strong immune system, after breathing all the
chicken droppings, and living summer after summer breathing the D.D.T.
from the crop dusters that sprayed the cotton to kill the boll weevils,
before they killed the cotton. And the D.D.T. that we sprayed in our
houses to kill flies, and mosquitoes big as Volkswagons, wasps,and dirt
dobbers. Nobody knew it was dangerous it smelled really awful, but it
did kill them bugs.

Strong but still small for my age I got all the good jobs, climbing up
the peach trees to get the real big ones, or the pecan trees to shake
the branches so the pecans would let go and fall to the ground. I felt
like I was really important and nescessary, especially to Daddy whose
big hands wouldn't fit in all the places that mine would, to tighten up
a boldt or loosen a screw, on the farm equipment.

People didn't worry so much about kids back then, there wasn't much
that they could get into. They also gave us credit for having enough
sense to come in out of the rain. He used to let my Sister and me ride
on the tail gate of the pickup truck, going fast down the blacktop
road. I am sure that it never crossed his mind to say yall hold on now.
He knew that we would.