CHICKENS, ICE AND LAUGHTER

The temperature was falling in the window and the thermometer refused to give us a break. She had been in New York for just under three weeks, she likes the cold weather, but 30 ° F was too much. the Jack Daniels we had bought few nights ago was giving its last sighs, and we were preparing to take what was still resting in its gut.

 - Tell me something that brings you back, whatever it is. How about you tell the story of the old "refrigerator"? - I said.

 She smiled, looked at her hands and searched through the fissures of her memories for that story.

 When Evelyn was still a girl there were no refrigerators, so they had to figure rather ingenious methods to keep the food from spoiling. In a wooden box that had the interior insulated with aluminum sheets, people put big blocks of ice and used it to keep food fresh. This piece of "furniture" was called the cooler and was the only resource that was known capable of keeping food from decomposing towards the end of the fifties. Evelyn and her youngest brother, Erwin, carried the blocks wrapped in bags, from the place where they stored it for sale back to their home. The heavy piece of ice was carried by the two siblings with great effort while walking on the cobbled streets of Santiago, in Chile. Along the way, the solid was dripping cold water as it melted by the sun, leaving a trail on the pavement that soon turned into air. After a long walking path, they finally got back home and managed to put the ice in the cooler, letting it cool whatever they chose to preserve that day. According to Evelyn, things did not last long, "maybe one day?" she said as she laughs, and her pupils became small behind the folds of her eyelids.

There were other methods, however, that helped to preserve food without decomposing, more folkloric methods, of course. A neighbor told Evelyn the secret technique to preserve butter, for example. You had to leave the butter in its original container, the paper it was wrapped in. Then, place it in a bowl full of water and leave a carrot floating next to it. With that, butter would not melt. Pure magic that Evelyn followed to the tee. The laughter did not wait, we were submerging in it. But there were more acts of magic that helped preserving food back then. We could not stop laughing as she started describing another method…people would build small pyramids with four sticks and hung pieces of meat from the center of the structure and that's it. That was all, the meat, according to what was believed back then, was preserved. It reminds me of the markets of Peru! Have you seen them? Asked Evelyn. There, things are still more or less the same, right? - she suggested. The truth is that most people at that time did not need refrigerators like we do today. Formerly chickens, for example, were not killed until the very day they became soup. We all had chicken coops, she said.

 - Chicken coops? In the city? - I asked surprised.

 - Of course - she says

 Everybody had chicken coops, Evelyn’s friends, her relatives, herself, everyone. Some of the years of her childhood, between 1955 and 1965, Evelyn lived on Esperanza Street, in Santiago. The yard of that house was about one hundred fifty feet long, an immense yard. There, her father sheltered more than 1,500 chickens. A structure very well designed according to Evelyn. From this coop Evelyn’s family got the eggs they consumed daily, but most of them were sold. Eduardo Lang, Evelyn’s father, was a great business man, he would sell almost anything to anybody. Elizabeth and Erwin, Evelyn’s younger siblings were responsible for collecting the eggs every morning. Each equipped with a basket, the two siblings would walk towards the chicken coop, dragging their shoes and take the eggs one by one. However, there were so many eggs that there was no basket big enough to hold them all. Elizabeth, once she had filled her basket, started storing them in the pockets of her pants, which soon after were exploding beyond repair. The yolk started dribbling down her pants, what a scene, Evelyn says. Erwin, on the other hand, realizing that there was no more space in his basket, started stripping himself of the eggs that could not fit, throwing them into the neighbor's yard. He threw them with such a feat that he managed to cross many meters with his right arm despite the young age and his sparse musculature.

 However, the most interesting part was when the chickens were killed. Especially when Olga did it, her aunt. She never learned how to do it properly, so she managed with a broomstick that she used as a lever. She rolled up the sleeves of her blouse, crossed the stick over the animal’s neck and squeezed the wood against her chest. Nobody was really sure if the bird was even dead as it still flapped its wings while Olga swung its body back and forth walking towards the kitchen. Olga was not very detail oriented, sometimes the poor bird would still be screaming while its feathers were being pulled, the kids had to tell her to stop.

 These stories make this beautiful woman of green eyes, laugh desperately. What a beautiful time this is…