The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been upgrading my carpentry skills lately, helping a buddy build a chicken coop for a good friend of ours who had a deadline to get it done since she had inherited some show birds from folks who needed to get them gone, (a long story I’ll spare you). Every now and then I get a wild hair to raise the rascally little fellows myself for the eggs, but then I remember my first experience with chicken husbandry, a story I will repeat here as a cautionary tale for myself. It goes something like this rightchere….
Now the South End’s got its own economics. Being’s how there’s no work, no industry, no banks and no investment firms, we’ve had to resort to alternative fiduciary strategies. Course I’m talking about bartering. You know, good old fashioned horse trading. Bartering’s an age-old tradition on the South End. It’s a cousin of stealing and an uncle of lying. When it’s working right, both ends of the trade feel like they cheated the other guy blind.

I got my first banjo in a swap for a .22 Remington rifle I didn’t want any more. Most of my illegal building structures are erected from bartered lumber, doors, windows and the like. I’ve traded boats and cars and pickups. Hell, I’d probably swap the muzzus if I weren’t so fretful she’d get the short end of the stick….

Course on the South End you’ll run into fellas who know the horse-trading game a whole lot better’n you. And I don’t mean just the artists. I was trading an old boy for some chickens when I first arrived and I was putting together my barnyard petting zoo. Chickens and a rear end for my Chevy half ton. He lived up some holler in a one room tarpaper house and lived completely off what he gleaned from the old dump. He had a TV showroom set up out in the drive: black and whites, color, consoles, cabinets, with or without hi-fi, whole entertainment centers. The chickens were there too, watching sixteen of their fav-o-rite programs. I said I’d take a dozen if they were good layers. He said, hoo boy, get ready for an omelette and we commenced to chasing chickens from CBS to the outhouse, from NBC to the barn. Stuffed em cackling and flapping in a burlap sack.

We counted em out at the end and this old boy says LOOKEE here and damned if he doesn’t pull two eggs out. Them’s real layers, he says with half his teeth missing. Course I was real pleased with this trade right from the get-go. Oldest trick in the book. Guess I never read the book. You all know, I suspect, I never got another egg and those old banty hens, being one hundred years old, was way too tough to eat. After awhile I just let em watch TV.

So I’m okay with letting someone else raise chickens for my eggs. And if I have to help to build the coop, that’s all right too. Sometimes in this harsh world, you still have to do some bartering. What an old geezer like me has learned is who you ought to barter with….

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