So Cold!

 

Growing up in rural Oklahoma, it was common to hear the old folks in my life, when asked, to refer to winter weather as being so cold, "It brought the birds to the chopping block," which, thinking about it now in a season turned 'to snow and ice, always brings a smile to my face.

It still gets cold around here, but there are no chopping blocks left, or darned few of them, and practically no one that knows what they are even when they are standing right next to them. The culture, and the people in it that used chopping blocks, is about gone. Well, not totally. 

When I looked out my window this morning, the birds were swarming my chopping block. I still have one. I use it all the time. It's a good one, over 20 years old, now. It's the third I've had, I think, since Pam took me in as a boarder. 

Back in the day, most rural homes had a chopping block kept "around back" for the purpose of beheading, de-footing, and de-winging small game and wildfowl. It was a necessary prelude to the skinning or plucking of same when brought in from the field for the table, a process now provided complete with sticky wrap and purple numbers by the giant food marts. Part of what we gain is what we lose. 

Whacking away animal parts declared inedible employed the use of either a small hand axe, or a meat cleaver, but the main tool was actually the chopping block against which the animal part was held and then whacked. There was sufficient resistance provided by a big section of tree trunk used as the "block" that the whacking was quite easily accomplished and the meat making process went on as handily as possible. By the way, watch your hands, and fingers. 

Left on the chopping block, embedded in the wood, even, would be tiny pieces of meat that the neighborhood songbirds absolutely loved, so tired were they of subsisting on winter's seed crop after a summer of gorging on "bug burgers." But they did not like venturing in to the block placed, as it was as a matter of convenience to its users, close to the back door where the people lived. 

Cold, snowy weather blasted away all former fears, bringing the birds close to the chopping block, indeed; a place, perhaps, where some of their friends were rendered, in their presence, in an unkind fashion, do you think? Balderdash. That Colorado miner who ate all his friends, one by one, after the big cave-in a few years back, proved that hunger conquers all civility. Pass the salt. Please.

Anyway, a few people still have chopping blocks, know what they are for, and how to use them. Mine is part of a well-seasoned red oak trunk. In our part of the state, any number of hardwood types serve well as chopping blocks, but where Jack Test lives out yonder in the Panhandle in Guymon, he has to use a huge trunk chunk of cottonwood, softwood, as that is about the only tree in that country that will grow to the proper chopping block size. His chopping block is huge, and sits just outside the back door of his upholstery shop on Fourth Street across the street from the tortillaria shop that smells so good. 

Jack's block is carved all over its sides with people's initials, magic signs (if they have any magic), insulting personal messages, and it's not altogether unlikely that using it, you will look down in the yellow grass growing around its base and see looking back at you a beautiful cock pheasant's red, white, and purple head, eye open, in just the same way as Marie Antoinette's head might have in another time and in another place; pretty, with makeup, probably. 

We chop all game and fowl smaller than a deer out there in the alley where sits the block, and then bring them inside where it is warm to pluck and skin. Plucking and skinning, dicing and icing, is a community endeavor, as it should be. Thinking about it, it may be a form of communism, I'm not sure. 

I know this: If you want to eat, you had better have some "skin" in the game, and some blood on your hands. It's quite a bit different from ordering out for pizza where a complete stranger (hit man?) kills and slices the "baby pepperonis" that you wind up eating miles away from the crime scene. I'm just sayin'.

Inside the shop, an assembly line is soon assembled. Some in the line are skinners; some in the line are butchers; some in the line are rinsers; some are baggers; some are trashmen, and some handle two or three jobs at once so skilled and industrious are they. In an incredibly short time the whole job is done without a speck of mess to be seen (those CSI types would draw a blank here) and the shop phone is ringing, which means that Kelli has the grease hot, and where are we, anyway. 

We have been close to the chopping block, Kelli, and we are coming just as quickly as we can. 

© 2011 Conrad M. Vollertsen