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Chicken spaghetti

Please don't read this blog if you are, say, eating lunch right now.
Especially chicken spaghetti.

I saw a flyer the Wichita Falls Drove 154 of the Benevolent Patriotic Order of Does USA sent us this week about its upcoming chicken spaghetti fundraiser. Immediately, fond thoughts of this ewwy-gooey Southern staple filled my mind.
But then I thought about my third sister.
She says she can't ever eat chicken spaghetti again because of a horrid dream she had when she was little.
Apparently, in the dream, Sis walked into the kitchen one day and my mom was stirring a big pot on the stove.
Sis asked what was in the pot and mom replied, "Chicken spaghetti. Wanna see?"
So Sis leaned over the pot and in the midst of all the chicken and spaghetti and cream of soup and chopped onions and bell peppers were tiny, bloody puppy heads.
My sister said the dream was so vivid that, to this day, she can't eat chicken spaghetti.
I guess I see her point.
Sis told me this story a few years ago, and it took me a little while to make a very startling and horrific Big Sis realization.
I don't think it was a dream.
I'm not saying my mom was cooking chicken/puppy head spaghetti, but I think my sister melded two events together in her young mind.
I remember the days leading up to it distinctly. Our collie had given birth to a litter of puppies, 5 or 6 of them, and they were only a week or so old.
About that same time, an old, grey starving female greyhound had wandered up to our house.
She wouldn't let any of us get near her, but I had spent about a week getting her to trust me. She had started eating a little, and we hoped to nurse her back to health.
I was in my early teens, I think, 13 or 14ish, which means little sis was around 7.
I came home from school that fateful afternoon, and the puppies were gone. So was the greyhound.
I went into the kitchen, and if I remember correctly, mom was, in fact, making chicken spaghetti. She was stirring it furiously, clanging the sides of the pot.
I asked her where the puppies were and she said she and pop had given the puppies away and taken the greyhound to the pound.
But I could tell something was wrong. Really, really horribly wrong.
Later that evening, when the rest of my little sisters were asleep, she told me the truth.
She had been in the kitchen cooking that afternoon when she looked out the window and saw the greyhound eating the puppies. She sprinted outside and they were all dead, nothing but blood and heads left behind.
Without thinking, instinct taking over, she buried the puppy heads before any of us kids got home and hosed off the blood.
And then she went back to cooking, which has always been her emotional outlet.
She said it's probably the worst thing she's ever seen or had to do.
Mom made me promise not to tell the other girls what had happened, but maybe somehow, Sister #3 heard us talking that night.
And in her young mind, chicken spaghetti and puppy heads were forever linked.
(I don't think is what the Does had in mind when they sent us information for publicity about their upcoming fundraiser.)

Posted by Lara Richards at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)