Animal Farm

My parents rented an old farmhouse from a man named Mister Gilmore. I never finalized the spelling of his last name, but I knew he was about a thousand years old and people referred to him as "Gilly." Gilly had throat cancer or something and talked through a voicebox that sounded like a vocoder. Gilly's voice scared me.

Although my parents were avid gardeners, they sure weren't farmers. The cows and other animals that lived in our barn belonged to other people. I don't know who. I think it rotated. Sometimes the Amish guy would block off the road with barbed wire for the cows, but forget to take it back in, so we'd be stuck until someone got a hold of the damn cows. At one point, when I was a toddler, I wandered into the cow pasture saying "Hi cows! Hi cows!" and to this day my parents can't figure out how I got in there. Indeed, one of my first phrases was "Big Cow," which I embarrassingly said to some heavyset woman in the Weis store at some point.

We still had a bunch of animals around, though. Chickens and rabbits were frequently bought for butchering purposes, but I was such a bleeding heart kid that it only happened with chickens. Bunnies, forget it! They stayed. Retarded distemper Amish kittens, they stayed. I almost drowned an Amish kitten once by dunking it in a bucket of rainwater. I explained to my parents that I was "trying to give Kitty a bath." We saved a dog, Max, from being shot by the Amish guy who lived in the house below us. We'd come home from shopping to find him at the barn with a shotgun to the dog's head, and it was so horrifying that my parents ended up taking him. I vividly remember the Rabid Raccoon Incident, which was the first time I ever saw an animal killed by a gun. There were snakes galore up there on that mountain; I remember my mom always warning me about garter snakes. Once there was a whopping rattler on our patio with a beautiful diamond pattern. Mom was terrified of it. One time a bear came onto our porch, after the giblets my parents had given the dogs...and it got stuck. My dad had to push the poor bear out of the porch. When Mom was pregnant with me and my dad worked night shift, she heard a bloodcurdling scream out in the woods, that sounded like a woman, but was really either a mountain lion or a bobcat. Despite the huge number of cats in the area, there were still tons of rats and mice in the barn. And of course, during hunting season, it wasn't unusual to come home to dead, gutted deer strung up between the trees by the Amish people at the end of the yard.
My parents had bad luck with chickens for a while. We bought a crate of baby chicks at one point; I can't remember how many, but I remember we had them in our kitchen overnight, and when we came down the next morning the only thing that remained of them was a drop of blood and a single feather. (A weasel had gotten in and devoured the lot.) Dad accidentally fried another batch of peeps with a grow light. Mom accidentally killed a whole fleet of chickens by mistakenly feeding them rhubarb leaves. We had a couple of Araucana chickens, which are known for laying colored eggs, but we mostly had your classic barred rock chickens. There was a rooster at one point named "Rover" who took a liking to my mom and followed her around a lot.

At one point, Dad bought some meat chickens. I won't forget my first chicken butchering - Dad had a stump in the backyard and chopped their heads off with a great big WHUMMMP, then they'd flop around a bit. The first time I witnessed this, it was a bit traumatizing, but then Dad showed me how cool it was to see the chicken's throat and how they continue moving, and by the sixth chicken I was like a bloodthirsty little Caligula.

Today, I have two pet bunnies, no chickens, no cats, no dogs, no mice, no rats, no snakes, and certainly no bobcats.