Oxfam Winner Announced! Unfortunate Oxfam Loser Snatched and Feared Eaten.

Bitchin’ Wives Club regular, Karen of Hollywood Farm was the lucky winner of the Oxfam coffee growers co-op $50 gift. Congrats, Karen! If you are struggling with any last minute presents, please keep Oxfam’s collection of charitable gifts in mind. They are easy to buy and can make a world of difference to someone living in a poverty-stricken section of the world.

Unfortunately, I have terribly sad news to report concerning one of the models in the country photo shoot… Henny Penny, the gorgeous red and black beauty I posed with, was snatched by a fox two nights ago and certainly became its dinner.

In addition to being a lovely, fat chicken who was a champion egg-layer, Henny Penny had the distinction of being the last of “granny’s chickens.” I want to cry just writing this, but will continue: Henny Penny’s keeper is an adorable seven-year-old little girl whose grandmother passed away last year, leaving behind a flock of chickens that she has cared for and added to since.  Henny Penny was the last of that original flock from Grandma.

*sniff*

As someone who cried when the handle irreparably broke on a pot that had belonged to my grandmother, forcing me to finally throw it away (this was after using it with duct tape on the handle for several years and a full ten years after her passing), I empathize completely with the pain Henny Penny’s family is feeling right now. 

I still have some treasured items of my grandparents that I see almost every day and remind me of them in the most affectionate way.

Like the egg whisk that came from my grandfather’s house. I never saw him eating scrambled eggs, so I always associate the smell of white toast and cinnamon sugar with him (and the eggbeater, by association). He wasn’t a big eater, so when we arrived after a long day driving to his house, we were always met with the only food options available for breakfast when we awoke the next day: Pepperidge Farm Extra Thin White Bread, butter, cinnamon sugar (in a diamond-etched glass jar with a rusty lid that had holes poked through it some 30 years earlier), and 7-Up.

Or the cutting board/serving tray from my grandmother’s. I imagine her slicing a roast in her kitchen back in Chicago every time I use it. Sometimes wandering, in my mind, from the kitchen to the back porch where I’d sit on the porch swing and follow the fence-line with my eyes, trying to discern what kind of vegetables or flowers were growing in the beds that lined it.  I see her licking her thumb and forefinger clean and then saying, “Amy, will you please go get the potato salad from the refrigerator?”

 

I miss my grandparents so much. 

Do you have any sentimental items that you use all the time in your daily routine, too? Are you as fearful of them breaking as I am, but unable to stop using them, either, because you love how they remind you of the person who owned it before?