Chapter 6 (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, cont.)

MOM’S FARMING VENTURE

Mom was a registered nurse when she met my father, but gave it up while we were young, to return to work after Jerry and I were in school. I know that she had returned to work before my younger brother Peter went to school, because we taught him how to climb the Catalpa tree in the side yard outside her bedroom window. She had been working the night shift and catching up on her sleep during the day. I don’t know where whomever who was supposed to be in charge at the time, but my mother awoke with three year old Peter calling, “Mummy, Mummy, look at me!” I vaguely remember giving him a quick course on how to climb back down again with my tired and angry mother anxiously watching and waiting to catch him if he slipped.

My mother was always looking for ways to get a little bit more money, and when we were too young for her to leave and work as a nurse in a hospital, she raised goats for milk, and rabbits for meat.

While she had the rabbits, we were much younger and it was during WWII when meat was rationed, and she had always sold them alive, even though she knew they’d be slaughtered. Otherwise it would have been known as the Black Market. However, she wouldn’t have like to had to slaughter them herself anyway. Us children were getting quite pale, and Mom felt we were not getting enough red meat, and, here she was raising that for others, so she decided to slaughter and cook up one for ourselves. What she didn’t know is that rabbits which seem so quiet and mute can squeal when in pain, and when she slaughtered that one rabbit, the poor thing squealed when she did it, just horrifying Mom, and she couldn’t eat the meat, and she never did that again. Knowing how I feel about not even being able to kill chickens I raise for food, I can only imagine how awful a memory it would have been for her, and I remember her saying that it so sickened her she had a problem even cooking it up for us, and couldn’t eat a bite of it herself.