Stories from Grandma

Grandma will turn 90 in June. That's a lot of years of living and enough stories to fill two long novels. My favorite stories are the ones from when she was a girl growing up on her family's Ohio farm. We got two gems on Saturday when Jordan and I stopped by for a surprise visit.

"We raised turkeys in the pasture to have them ready to sell for Thanksgiving. Around the pasture were trees where foxes lived. The fox would come in and kill turkeys in the early morning. So my dad came up with a plan. He had Girly (that is what he called my Mom - she was a big woman) go outside and run the car at 4am. The exhaust from the car would keep the foxes off the pasture. Every morning from when the turkeys were out of the brooder until they were butchered, Girly was up at 4am running the car for 15 minutes."

"Sundays we would killed a couple chickens for dinner. My dad had a stump that he used to chop the heads off the chickens. My brother Jack would catch a bird and Dad would chop. I hated to hear that ax come down - Whack! So I would go inside the play the piano as hard as I could so I couldn't hear the chop. I just hated that the chicken was being killed. But I sure did love the tasty chicken for Sunday night dinner."