Reaping and Sowing
“I should hate her,"thought Frances as she stood in the corner of her backyard holding a fully plucked chicken carcass she’d just been gifted by her new neighbor, Gladys. Frances didn’t like Gladys, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. She was nice enough. Funny in a self-deprecating kind of way. It wasn’t her hair, though her hair always looked like she’d just had it blown out no matter how she’d slept the night before or when she’d washed it last. And it wasn’t that she farmed while wearing Vineyard Vines and shoes that had maybe been worn and discarded by Martha Stewart, it’s that Gladys could pluck a chicken—like this chicken that Frances held now—rip every last puff of down from it’s slick, pimply body, maybe wash her hands and refresh her chap-stick, and then look like she was ready to go grab a latte or play a doubles match.
It was, most likely, that Gladys had only wanted to tryfarming and was simply in the process of reinventing herself.
Frances flicked a leaf off the sickly yellow corpse dangling from her fist as she recalled Gladys recalling her days on Wall Street as a top executive at the top hedge fund at the top of the tallest building in the city. In every respect, her prior job had sounded “pretty high up there.” But then there was the crash, the market adjustment, and they had to let her go. Poor thing. Poor Gladys. Her severance package was barely enough to fund a small country, much less buy this old thousand-acre working farm/winery on the North Fork of Long Island.
And she acted like being laid off, gaining financial independence, plucking a chicken without one blood-tipped feather ever landing on her $300 blue jeans—was no big deal. None of it! Nothing was ever a big deal to her. She could launch a space shuttle from her front porch,thought Frances,and act like she’d just loaded the dishwasher. Like ‘what? This old thing? This space shuttle? Oh, it’s fine. I just had it laying around. My nephew wasn’t using it anymore, so thought I’d launch it and get it out of the house.’
Frances realized she was choking the life out of her lifeless chicken.
She dropped her arms and that night’s dinner to her sides and took a deep breath. She filled her lungs with the same warm, grassy air she and her parents and her grandparents and her great grandparents had breathed in all their lives, generation after generation of farmers and farmhands and vintners, all here on the Northfork, everything from pumpkins to fiddleheads to pinot gris. Frances loved it here. She loved her family, her friends, her parish, her little house her unmarried freedom. She loved the skills she’d developed over the years and her expertise in raising grapevines from mere seeds and coaxing the few turkeys they raised for the holidays to eat more feed and grow meatier than turkeys on neighboring farms.
Expertise and skills her new neighbor, Gladys, could apparently develop within nano-seconds simply by googling what those skills were.
Frances suddenly realized she was coveting her neighbor and felt dirty and wrong. She thought of Father Chapin and his teachings and focused on the sky and pink hued clouds drifting by and pushed those jealous thoughts from her head as best she could. For the most part, gone. All gone.
Feelings remained, though.
Frances held up the dead bird and based on the tiny swirl of emotions still whirling around her gut she didn’t know whether to kiss it, punch it, salute it…but she forgave Gladys her perfection, her flawlessness and, in the end, Frances decided to pray for her chicken carcass, before stuffing it with lemon, rosemary and butter and shoving it deep into the fiery pits of hell.
“Oven!” corrected Gladys. “I meant, I need to go shove this bird in the oven.”