Snow no longer thrilled me, especially the kind we had now that it was March. No longer soft and fluffy, snow from December and January lay in hateful patches of slick spots in the driveway where it had been packed down by car and tractor tires. On the back lawn old snow lay in dirt-stained, sodden drifts of grainy ice-pellets. The melting weather last week had reduced a snowman I’d made earlier in the winter near the backdoor of the farmhouse, to something that resembled a tree-stump made of ice.

I loved Saturdays because I didn’t have to go to school, but this morning I had a case of the late-winter blahs. We hadn’t had fresh snow for a couple weeks. Snow we had earlier in the winter was half-melted away. When I went out to play in the yard, not only did I get cold, but I got muddy, which I hated! The sticky mud was horrible. I stared mournfully out of my bedroom window at the farmyard below.

My apathy disappeared instantly as I noticed ice-ferns had grown in the corners of the windowpanes during the night. I reached out to touch the tip of one feathery fern. My warm fingertip melted a small round spot. I admired the beautiful, frosty designs. Then I realized that if we had a cold night, the mud in the farmyard would be frozen. I decided to bundle up and go outside.

Walking across the frozen mud-rutted yard made me wobble and almost fall the way I did when I tried to walk over a rockpile. My first stop was the barn. Daddy would be doing his morning chores. I loved to follow him as he worked. He was using a hay fork to put hay from the mow in front of the cows. The cows were conversationally mooing, snorting and flipping small tufts of hay with sassy tosses of their heads. The barn felt comfortable, but I knew there was no furnace. My brothers told me that all the warm animals in the barn made the air warm.

When Daddy left the barn to feed and water the chickens, I followed him. The chickens were funny to watch, but they didn’t fascinate me like the cows did. It was also my opinion that chicken manure smelled worse than cow manure. Sometimes the birds picked on each other. That morning Daddy found a dead chicken. He wasn’t sure why it had died.

Living on a farm meant that most children-like me-realized and accepted that sometimes animals died. We also butchered some animals to feed the family. There was no squeamishness about that. If we remembered at the table which cow provided the meat, we’d lift a fork and say, “Good ole number thirty-four, she sure tastes good!”

The death of an animal because of injury or sickness was hard to take, though. Sometimes the sweet baby calves got sick with what Daddy called ‘the scours’ and died. Steps were taken to stop it from happening again. A weasel once got into the chicken coop many years before I was born. Mom said that Daddy told her the weasel wasn’t even hungry and angrily complained, “The weasel killed as many of the chickens as he could, just for the pure joy of killing!”

When animals died, especially during the winter, I suspected that their bodies were taken to a large rockpile in the back-forty and were covered with stones. I found bones there, once. Daddy carried the dead chicken out of the coop and put it down next to the building. He would take care of disposing it after he was finished with his regular chores.

I didn’t follow Daddy to his next job. I was morbidly fascinated by the dead chicken, so I hung around looking at it and nudging it with the toe of my boot. One of the times I nudged the body to turn it over, I heard the chicken make a little croaking sound. Intrigued that pushing air out of a dead chicken would make a sound, I put my foot fully onto the dead body and pushed. “Squawk!” Despite knowing instinctively that what I was doing was wrong, and disrespectful, I made the dead chicken squawk a few more times.

As an adult, I hate to admit that I once stepped on a dead chicken just to hear it squawk. I prefer to imagine that I just performed CPR on the chicken. Unfortunately, my life-saving exercise was unsuccessful. Our chicken died prematurely and didn’t end up being one of our chicken dinners.