This Rooster Is Too Cold To Crow
June Six Word Photo Story Challenge: “Black & White — Freestyle”
The rooster crows, the neighborhood knows.
My parents met in high school and had been married for a little over three months on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and their lives were changed forever. On August 10, 1942, my father received a letter from the Selective Service System telling him to report on August 12, 1942, for induction. He ended up serving as a logistics officer in the Air Force. After the war, my parents settled in a small town South of where they had grown up.
My father was a high school principal and educator. He and my mother and some of their friends built the house that I grew up in with their own hands over two summers. The cupola and weather vein in this photograph were ornamental touches on the house that celebrated their Pennsylvania Dutch heritage.
I wanted to follow in my parents' footsteps by building a house for my wife and me in Northern California. I had to do some convincing since my wife is a psychologist who worked with couples and had two couples in her practice because of the strains that house-building put on their relationship. I finally convinced her by agreeing to set aside a therapy fund to use if we needed it. We had so much fun building the house that we were able to use the therapy fund to upgrade our countertops and cabinetry.
We bought an existing home built in the 1940s and rented it out for five years while we saved up to build the house of our dreams. Our renter asked if she could move the ornamental chickens she was raising into the backyard. I checked with the city. There was no law that prohibited chickens in the neighborhood so we agreed.
Before we started construction we wrote up a flyer with information about the work hours along with our contact information. My wife delivered it to neighbors within earshot letting them know they could call us for any reason if the work bothered them. One neighbor she talked to asked if our house was the one with the chickens. My wife thought “Oh, oh, I knew we should have never allowed those chickens” but she confessed to the neighbor that ours was the chicken house. The neighbor put my wife at ease when she said “I will miss the sound of roosters in the morning, it reminds me of the countryside where I grew up.”
