We had only a few more weeks to my mother’s birthday. Some preparations had been done; many finalized. It was not going to be such a big event, as the celebrations were scheduled to take place indoors. Still, I feared that we were not nearly as prepared as we ought to be. Thing is, we did not need birthdays or any other special events to have our home packed full of guests.

Thankfully, mummy had been rearing a couple of hundreds of birds for several months. She had layers and broilers as expected, housed in different pens. She would sing at the top of her voice each time she went to feed them or give them water. She cringed whenever their appointment with the Vet was due. She literally grinned from ear to ear each time she came with the eggs she had just collected from the pens. I must confess that I was really glad that she would rather attend to caring for them all by herself as she felt no one could cater for them as she would. Phew! Talk about the trouble she saved me from and oh the stench too!

 

As we ran through the items on the list; checking to be sure we had not omitted any important part of our planning, I told my mum that we were yet to arrive at an agreement on the number of broilers we were going to use for the event. My mum stared at me with shock in her eyes. I gazed at her, trying to figure out what necessitated the surprise. “We would have to buy the chickens we will be using for the party”, she said. She explained how she had gotten so fond of the birds she was rearing and even said she could recognize a few of them individually. She had gotten so accustomed to being their caretaker that she adjudged herself as inhuman if she allowed us to use the birds as meat for her party.

One of my brothers ignored every word she said and we went ahead and used as much chickens from her poultry farm as necessary for the event. Wondering what we served my mum?! You guessed right, we actually had to buy a few birds to make some delicacies just for her but enough to last a while. Oh my mum and the chickens in the poultry!