Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Ask Aunt Tillie: Don't You Have Some Chickens to Clean?

Dear Aunt Tillie,

Do you really believe a respectable Amish woman like yourself should be answering the tedious questions of anonymous, humorless, blog trolls?

Especially when there are a bunch of chickens waiting for a good cleaning.

Lauren

Dear Lauren,

Good point, Lauren. I do have about 50 poulets needing to be dressed (now there's a question -- why do they call butchering chickens, "dressing" them? Wouldn't "undressing" them be more appropriate?) I've cut way back on the chicken butchering since my youngest daughter, Lydia, got married. She and her husband, Leroy, and their five children are living in the big house while Abner and I have retired to the attached "doddy haus." So I wait to do my chicken dressing until Lydia and her three oldest children, who are 8, 7 and 6 years old, can help me. Those little kids are pretty good feather pluckers. I don't quite trust the children yet with the ax, but they sure are a help in getting those feathers off. But, here I am rambling again. You wanted to know if I'm not spending too much time answering tedious questions from anonymous, humourless, blog trolls. I don't think so. My nephew, Amishlaw, takes care of the tendentious trolls. He's a lawyer,you know, and he tends to get a little tendentious himself. (I'll bet you're a little surprised that a woman with an eighth-grade diploma would be using words like "tendentious." I happened to see it one day when I was looking through the dictionary we keep in the outhouse to use when we run out of toilet paper. They don't give away Sears Roebuck catalogs anymore, but you can still pick up used dictionaries pretty cheaply when the library has its used book sales.) But here I am rambling again, and I do need to get out to the strawberry patch.

8 comments:

Debra Hope said...

What kind of Amish farm boy are you, anyway? I have to explain "ding an sich" to you and now you can't even spell "pullets"?
I'm beginning to suspect your vaunted Amish credentials.

Crockhead said...

Well, Debra, most of my Amish ancestors actually came from France when they immigrated to America and I was using the French spelling for young chickens. I realize the Benders came from Germany so "ding an sich" might mean something to you other than a dent in the sich.

Anonymous said...

Now don't you be calling Aunt Tillie "respectable," Lauren. That's what the English do, and Aunt Tillie ain't one of them.

And I don't care how she spells as long as she can make good chicken and dumplings.

rdl said...

I think Aunt Tillie should answer pg's wordy diatribes.

Crockhead said...

Good to see you back, Uncle Menno. I'll tell Aunt Tillie what you said, but she's still a little wary about your request to nibble on her gingerbread, so I doubt she'll have much to say to you.

rdl, Amish don't go to movies, so I'm afraid Aunt Tillie is even more ignorant about movies than I am. If we can get her rambling, we could probably get her to admit she did sneak off to a few movies when she was a teenager, but her idea of high art would probably be Abbott and Costello. I'm afraid pg would die of apoplexy if we let Aunt Tillie hold forth on movies.

Trucking Fiddler said...

Can't resist intruding on your family thing because Aunt Tilly made me laugh right here at an Ohio truckstop w/ my laptop - it was the image of using a dictionary in that way. I remember the outhouse and being at my grandparents' farm in NE and watching Grandma 'dress' chickens and chop the heads off; and the chickens would run around with no heads for awhile! I like reading Aunt Tillie's wisdom. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Diatribe alert!

Please let Aunt Tillie review movies. I have some Fellini films that will absolutely charm the plain undies off her.

I also have some movies about chickens. Werner Herzog made a movie about hypnotizing chickens. I think it might have been Stroszek, but I may be wrong. He also made a movie about auctioneers, about how the language they speak is a unique kind of American idiom.

My ancestors also came from France. Well, Alsace-Lorraine, which may be France and may be Germany, depending on what year we're talking about.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the Crockhead for dragging his sorry self out to the secret Mennonite poker party last night, where he feigned ignorance of the game until he had won $3, at which point he abruptly went home.

PG

Crockhead said...

PG, there is not a snowcone's chance in a hot place that Aunt Tillie will be going to see any Fellini movies. She is getting too old to risk getting excommunicated and barred from eating with her family. You might be able to trick her into seeing the Herzog movie about hynotizing chickens if you rented the community center, and billed it as an educational slide show about poultry husbandry, but I doubt it. Face it, not everyone's life revolves around movies. Aunt Tillie would rather play with her grandchildren or hoe in her garden than sit around for two hours in a dark room watching a version of reality that is foreign to her.