Chicken coop/doll house...

I spoke to my Aunt Dolly this afternoon.... and told her about the chickens. She laughed when I told her I had named my three hens Dolly, Jaye, and Edie. When I described their personality traits to her, she laughed even more-- she agreed with me that the chickens are following in the steps of their namesakes: Dolly being so tidy with the nesting boxes; Jaye always preening her feathers; Edie wanting to be first in line at feeding time.

Aunt Dolly told me that when she was a young girl, grandpa built a chicken coop in the backyard of the family home in Queens. The area was very rural then, and moving out to Queens from The City was a big deal. Anyone who was able to move out of Little Italy and escape out into the countryside was considered very lucky indeed.

So Grandpa raised chickens... they had fresh eggs every morning, and when the hens got too old for egg-laying, they became chicken soup or roasted chicken. Ouch. "What can you do? We had to eat!"... said my 96-yr-old Aunt Dolly.

When my grandfather started making more money, and my grandmother got tired of cleaning the coop and chasing chickens around the yard who were no longer laying eggs, they "did away with" the chickens and had an empty coop sitting in the corner of the backyard.

My Aunt Dolly decided that the chicken coop would make a wonderful movie-star house, so she asked Grandpa if she could have the coop. He told her that if she cleaned it up, she could have it. Even then, I'm sure my aunt was a quick and efficient cleaning-machine. (We all tell her she's like the little pink Energizer Bunny-- she keeps going, and going, and going....) So my then fourteen-year-old Aunt Dolly cleaned that coop from top to bottom-- the ceiling, the walls, the floor. She said she hung up curtains on the little window and put down a rag-rug, and added an old chair and a tiny table. Then she wallpapered the walls with pictures of movie stars, cut from magazines and newspapers. "Every movie star of the day was pasted up in that coop," my aunt told me.

She said she would sit in that coop-turned-movie-star-house and just sit and look at all the pretty women, and dream of the day when she could have grown-up clothes and perfectly-styled hair, and "....the shoes! ... the shoes they wore! How I especially loved their shoes!"

I sat there on the phone today and listened to my 96-yr-old Aunt Dolly talk about her special little place in the backyard of my grandparents' house which I can still see in my mind right this very minute. The house that Grandpa built, which is still standing, but no one in the family lives in it anymore. And the more Aunt Dolly talked, the younger she sounded.... I could just picture her in my mind's eye, smiling and talking, probably walking around with the phone because she sounded too excited to just be sitting down.

The last thing my aunt said was "How I loved that big old house.... how I loved that big old house...."

I know, Aunt Dolly, I know. We all loved that big old house. (And that's why I love this house, because it reminds me so much of that house.)

By the time I was born, the chicken coop/movie star house was no longer there. In its place was an six-foot-tall brick barbeque bit, also built by Grandpa. And every Sunday, weather permitting, my dad would be cooking chickens out on that grill. Chickens that came in packages from the A&P, not from someone's private coop.

Aunt Dolly asked me to send her photos of the chickens.... "Especially the red one that you named after me!"