Today, I did something that I will never do again.  I cut up a chicken from scratch--which I used to do once a week when Ken and four kids were home.  It had been 7 years since I had fried a chicken and the only reason I did it was because David, my grandson, begged me to.

I couldn't pull the skin off of it!!  I have lost so much strength in my hands, that it took me almost an hour just to get it cut up.  But David had said, "Grandmother, you've always told me that fried chicken doesn't taste right unless you cook the whole chicken.  Please fry me a chicken."  Which is true.  There is something about all the juices from brown meat, white meat, liver, gizzard and the fat and skin sizzling in the cast iron skillet that makes a difference.  Plus, you get flour and gummy juice sticking to your hands.  Which, every little bit, you scrape off into the skillet to brown so that you have crunchies for the gravy.  Besides all which, you don't get a pulley bone unless you cut the chicken up yourself. David called me from college once to have me walk him through it--which I did, but he didn't cut the chicken up and only fried white meat.  That doesn't work.  So there I was today, by myself in the kitchen, cutting up a chicken and making a terrible mess.

And I thought about how things change.  I  don't know anyone in my family that cuts up a chicken  anymore.  And the generation before me wouldn't be caught dead buying a chicken already cut up and packaged in a store.  I remember when I was a little girl going down town Pryor to get a chicken with my grandmother at the chicken house.  They had a zillion coops with chickens squalking.  I can't even begin to describe the smell.

Gran would pick out the chicken she wanted and the man would kill it, put it in boiling water just long enough to loosen the feathers, scrape, then pull the feathers off and finally, gut it.  It had to be fresh or she wouldn't eat it.  After inhaling the smell it was hard to imagine the final product being edible.  The chicken house was right off main street.  It smelled up the entire town.  (The first time I went to Paris, I was shocked that they sold chickens with the head still attached.)  Before my gran moved to Pryor, I would go out to the chicken pen with her.  She would back the hen she wanted into a corner, grab it by the neck and sling it around and snap off it's head.  Then wait for it to stop hopping around before she tended to it.  After I was grown I asked her for her chicken and dumpling recipe.  She wrote, "First you snap off the chicken's head and throw it on the cellar to flop.......