I’ve got to get out of these clothes—fast. It's freezing out here! The quicker I get these stinky clothes off and get my fresh ones on, the sooner Sally will let me into the nice warm kitchen. I can smell the dinner cooking and I can't wait to eat it. It smells like meatloaf. I love her meatloaf! Man, it's cold! I'm shaking all over! The thermometer in the chicken house said 10 degrees. Okay, gotta concentrate: shoes and pants are off, two more buttons and the shirt's off. Come on fingers, stop shaking, just two more buttons. That's it. Now put the clean pants and shirt on and go in! I left all the smelly clothes on the back porch and went into the kitchen.
I did that bone-chilling exercise during my Junior year in high school many years ago. And believe it or not—the freezing change-of-clothes experience not withstanding—I have very warm memories of that year. I was living with my sister Sally, her husband Mark, and my sweet little niece, Suzie, in a small country town in Maryland. Mark raised six thousand broiler chickens and sold them when they were ready for market. Then a new brood came in—thousands of little chicks—and it started all over again. I went to the chicken house, which was four big rooms, every day after school to water and feed them. Sometimes I had to carry 50 pound sacks of feed up to the second floor rooms. Then there were different mixes of feed depending on the age of the chickens and I had to mix in some special medicines now and then so we didn't get an epidemic of some kind of chicken disease. So I was careful to do everything right.
But before I could do much of anything, each new brood of little chicks had to get to know and trust me first because they frightened easily and wouldn't let just anyone take care of them. One of the tricks Mark taught me was to whistle every time I entered one of the rooms—not just any whistle but a soft, low, soothing kind of sound. If they heard someone coming and didn't know who it was they all ran, frantically, to a corner and bunched up together, which was not good because some of them could have been smothered to death, especially when they were still small chicks. So as I approached each room I began my soft little whistle to let them know not to worry, that it was me. It worked like a charm. In fact it worked so well that when I walked into the room they didn't even throw me a sideways glance, let alone a “Hi Bobby, it's nice to see you.”
Now about those remarkably stinky clothes that I had to change really fast before I froze to death. Like I said, Mark sold the chickens when they were ready for market, which, if everything went right, was in about ten weeks. At that time, a few big trucks would arrive to get the chickens. Well, after the trucks left Mark and I had the job of cleaning the chicken house to get ready for the next arrivals and that, I can tell you without hesitation, was not anyone's favorite kind of work. Ten weeks of droppings from six thousand chickens left an eight inch thick layer of some of the most acrid of smelly stuff ever imagined on the floors of all four rooms. That's a helluva lot of chicken shit! Within minutes of shoveling into it, our hair, nostrils, skin, and clothes, it seemed, would not, could not, ever be redeemed. It was quite impressive, actually.
So Sally made a rule—no, more like a law. On those clean-out-the-chicken-house-days, when we came home we had to take off our unwelcome, amazingly pungent clothes on the outside, unheated back porch and change into a fresh set before we were allowed to enter the house. And there they would remain until she had a chance to wash them—however many times it took—and until they passed her particular smell test at which time they may or may not be wearable in her house once more. Who could blame her and, anyway, she was doing us all a favor.
Interestingly, all these years later as I write this little story, for some reason I cannot recapture that special smell. All the other memories are alive and well but that odor just may be lost to me forever and that is just fine.
Note: This was written for a writing competition. The rules required that the story begins with this sentence: "I’ve got to get out of these clothes—fast." and that it should be about 750 words in length. It is a true story.