The Champaign City Council took a “straw” poll at Tuesday night’s meeting — a fitting metaphor since their nearly-unanimous, informal vote is the next step in lifting the ban prohibiting backyard hens in the city limits.
As far as I’m concerned, the detractors against recanting the ordinance can site noise, odor, and disease issues until the cows come home. Although I grew up in the city during my formative years, this issue triggered a memory from my youth that is as fresh as newly mowed hay.
It was the first time I went to pick up Reggie Creer for drum corps practice. As we pulled up, he came flailing out of his backyard holding his ribs and laughing so hard that he fell to the ground next to the old man’s Country Squire. His grin was infectious, and as I smiled my way out of the car to investigate, he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward the side gate. Once we got behind the house, the source of his hysterics became morbidly obvious.
Reggie’s mother was a huge, formidable woman with torpedo-sized breasts. When she wanted a hug, she’d say, “Gimme some sugar.” To this day, I can smell her hair, and remember my skinny frame being absorbed into her body. In the hug department, I have yet to meet her match in authenticity and tenderness. Even as a teenager, I wondered how she and Mr. Creer procreated. He was just over five feet tall and 105 lbs soaking wet. I never saw him without a cigarette, and despite a polite correction or several, he always called me Mavritt, or Mavrick.
Today was not a day for hugs, polite corrections, or anything near the tenderness category. What I saw resembled a scene from Gulliver’s Travels.
Mrs. Creer stood in a lovely floral print dress and a plain blue apron, with the neck of a chicken bent over the wide blade of a carving knife. At her feet, headless Chicken-Lilliputians in different stages of death’s coil, flopped and danced their way up to the big coop in the sky.
My first-generation, Norwegian grandparents ran a dairy farm in Wisconsin, but I was knee-high to a cheese curd back then and unaware of what it took to work with animals. So, this barnyard spectacle was something new for my urbanite brain to process. When I look back, it was a spontaneous, but necessary introduction to what food really is, and where it really comes from.
I stepped closer.
Reggie stayed behind, covered his mouth, and tried to stifle his macabre delight.
“Hello, sugar,” she said, and deftly pulled the edge through the bird’s bones and blood.
“Hi, Mrs. Creer.”
“You take that foolish friend of yours and run off to band practice now, won’t you?”
“Yes ma’am.”
There was a time in this country when we all knew where food came from, where babies came from, and the realities of life and death. We didn’t need sex-education or R-rated movies to drool over, because the birds and the bees, and the bulls and the cows, and the mares and the stallions, and the sows and the boars were a natural part of our upbringing.
We were farmers — or at the very least, we had a friend in 4-H who could help explain things to us.
Barring the hipster parents who may think it’s trendy to set up a coop as part of a cute hobby for their indulged brats, I trust the city’s populace to use discretion and common sense in this matter — just as the city council has done.