Down on the Farm: Feather Pillows

I don't know if it's because of the "eggs"cellent jokes and comments I received on my chicken-raising "eggs"perience, (they really "cracked" me up), or what, but I just can't get the those feathered friends out of my mind.  Once again, I will broach the subject of chickens, although this blog takes a different route.

I think everybody will agree with me when I say, "I have a favorite pillow!"  I found mine when I was in junior high school.  It actually belonged to my Mom and was a true feather pillow.  It would shape to my head every night and hold that shape perfectly throughout.  It was so comfortable and cuddly.  It was as if it gently cradled my head and lulled me to sleep every night, (or was that the late night studying that put me to sleep?)  Ahhh, the memories.

After I graduated from high school and was packing up to go to BYU, my comfortable, old friend, that feather pillow, was one of the first things in my pile to go with me.  Night after night, no matter what happened during the day, there was my pillow waiting for me. 

And then it happened. 

I was probably half way through my freshman year when the tragedy occurred.  One night, after a grueling day of study, I snuggled down into my campus-appointed bed, hugged by my most favorite-of-all-times pillow.  As I was sinking down into it, I felt a stick under my head.  Now although my Dad may have thought I was a princess, I had never had a true "Princess and the Pea"experience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea But, that was what was happening here. I thought of that story as I lay there, trying to think how a stick could have got into my pillow.  I reached up, tentatively, and felt the piece of wood that was so irritating.  As I ran my hand along to the end, I froze!  To my horror, I felt a foot, a chicken's foot!  They must have thrown the whole chicken in there, legs and all!

Sometimes, especially at night, you just can't deal with something like a claw in your pillow.  I re-fluffed the pile of feathers, and although the Edgar Allen Poe story, "The Telltale Heart," http://www.poestories.com/read/telltaleheart beat in my head, I fell asleep to the rhythm.

Many nights I layed down, trying to ignore what I knew to be under my head.  It couldn't be true.  I had slept on this pillow every night for six years, or more.  Why had I never discovered this THING?

One night, upon pulling back the covers, I could take it no more.  I threw that pillow quickly to the floor.  I would deal with the fiendish appendage in the light of day.

After I awoke, there was much to do.   Studies to be read, tests to be taken, the everyday duties that come with living with five roommates; the list goes on and on.  The forbidding task awaiting me at my bedside was too much. Maybe on the weekend I would get around to it.  I pushed the pillow underneath my bed carefully with my foot.

That chicken foot lay under my bed for months.  One morning, I awoke feeling invincible.  Today was the day I was going to be free.  Today was the day I would find "the claw" and take care of it.  It would haunt my nights no more.  I bravely pulled the pillow out from under the bed and felt around.  I quickly found the offending "stick" and ran my fingers along it.  I felt the knee joint, (or whatever that is called in a chicken), the scales along the leg, the foot that had shrivelled up into a claw, as if grasping onto something, probably life itself.  I could not understand how I had missed this large appendage all of those years.  But here it was, not in my mind, but sitting in my hands, as true as life.

I relived the memories I had shared throughout the years with this pillow.  We had been through a lot together.  I briefly thought maybe I could just overlook the offensive "claw," but knew I could not.  There comes a time when you have to move on.  I would have to find another place to dream.

I'm still searching for a pillow that compares to that down-filled place I once layed my head.  Although the years pass, I haven't given up hope.  Someday I will find one, and when I do, I will sleep as I did once upon a time.  Until then, I hope that misplaced appendage finds its way back to that legless chicken in the sky; the one that still cackles in my dreams now and again.