Are you chicken???

I sometimes get a chance to wonder why I do what I do...for my family, I mean.  Take today for example, for three hours I stood over a vat of cold, bloody water and plucked the chicken feathers the machine missed.  Why would I do such a thing?  That is what you are asking me, because you think I am insane.  "You know they sell those at wal-mart!" (hehe...)
Yes, you are correct they do. And yet, I stood there and plucked as one bucket filled up with feet, one with guts, and one with feathers and such....
Thankfully, all I did was pluck.  I can do that.  It is really no different than standing at your kitchen sink with your raw chicken.
My kids reactions were interesting.  Hotrod was thoroughly impressed.  He loved what I was doing and the "hard work" Mom was doing.  He checked everything out, looked at the headless chickens, the plucking, the gutting...everything. Princess on the other hand..."Yuck" is all she would say.  She went near to check it out once. And only once.
The years of dissection in college and teaching prepared me for the smell, or I should say, how to avoid the smell.  It was not pleasant, but neither is dissection fluid.  How did I manage for all those years??? A trick I learned in college.  You breathe through your mouth, not your nose.  Yes, you get a whiff here and there, but for the most part it is like having a stopped up nose.  
Once I finally got home, I stripped and jumped in the shower.  If I could have cleansed myself with bleach, I would have.  I just scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed!!!!!!!!!!!!! Then threw on a skirt and went to take pics for a friend of her little girl at a recital, as if what I did this morning was normal.
The thing is, for years it was normal.  It has only been the past 60 yrs or so that we have been separated from our food source. I like the idea of knowing where my food is coming from, what is in it, and how it was processed, and how it was made. This has been a slow process for me, but just like a snowball starts off slow and grows, I have done the same thing.
Anyway...those are my thoughts for the moments, I have survived.