My mom was killed in our home, and everyone thinks my dad did it. During the investigation, I've been sent to Crazy Creek to visit my grandma, who I haven't seen in seven years.
About a week later, I was all settled in. Hazel really did come back, this time with some cat food for Willow. The general store was only open on Mondays, so Willow got "home brew" which was a bunch of organs chopped up with some brown rice and eggs. It was pretty disgusting, and weird seeing that angelic little face eat what I knew was hearts, livers, lungs, and kidneys. But Hazel pointed out it was "nutritionally dense", and not any worse than eating legs and wings like humans do. I had to tell her I was mostly a vegetarian. Like 80%.
I couldn't watch the true crime stories with my grandma. They weren't gory, but the topic of death made my stomach sink. I wondered how grandma could stand them, being so old herself. Shouldn't old people be even more afraid of death? So whenever they came on, I'd take a loud shower and lock myself away in my room with my Faerie Encyclopedia, feigning sleepiness.
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Grandma took me to see the chickens. Their coop was so warm that icicles formed around the edges, meaning the heat from inside heated up the roof enough to melt snow. Even though you'd think more icicles meant something was colder. There were three of them, one blue (Muffin), one black and white (Moony), and one red (Sunny). The blue one had a golden head that looked like an eagle. They didn't have a rooster because Ranger took care of them in the summer when they went outside. Also, chickens didn't need a rooster to lay eggs. They didn't cheep cheep like other birds, but made sounds like croaking and purring to each other. They sounded friendly, like they were deep in conversation. Grandma said they were. They were also amazing poo machines. Grandma "mucked out" the coop--scooped the poop into a bucket, to dump it into the compost pile. Chicken poop has phosphorus, she explained, something so precious that people mine for it. And chickens give it to us for free.
I fed Dandelion the cow. She wasn't black and white, but solid reddish brown, with shaggy hair. She had horns. I didn't know girl cows had horns. Grandma showed me how to use a pitchfork and I brought hay to her waiting trough, along with apple chunks from my pockets. Her tongue was rough and strong, and she would stick it into her own nostrils as often as lick my hands.
Grandma showed me the basement, her "root cellar" which I vaguely remembered from childhood. The walls and floor were red mud. I didn't see how it didn't just collapse, but grandma said the soil was strong because of all the trees around to hold it in place with their roots. The basement was mostly for storing food: jam, pickles, wine, bare potatoes in wooden crates. She said she would sit down there when it got too warm in the summer, and if I was still visiting by next summer, she would show me how to pickle.
I wanted to see the hot summer, and sit on the earthen floor with grandma and make boring cucumbers into exciting pickles. But that meant wishing for my dad to still be in prison, or wishing that he was convicted, and what kind of kid wishes for that? It was like wishing you were sick so you could stay home from school, but worse.
Each day, grandma and I would wake up and do our morning stretches. We made breakfast--eggs and vegetables--fed the chickens and the cow, and walked a circle around the farm. Then we would read, or she would knit and I would watch, or we would make a loaf of bread, letting the yeast rise in the heat of the sunroom among the plants and sparse insects who were lucky enough to weather the winter inside. Lunch was leftovers of the dinner from the previous day. For dinner we would make soups, trays of roasted vegetables, lasagnas, whatever combination we could invent from eggs, tomatoes, and whatever she dug out from her root cellar. Then she would feed the furnace chunks of wood she'd chopped herself, and I would brush at the antennae with a long broom until most of the snow was knocked off, and we would see what channels we could get in.
