Up be-Pepys, of a fair, breezy Morning

And, once shaved, walked half a block down to the espresso shop, where did buy a 4-druple Grande, ye-which I am now savouring with matitudinal alacrity, while I muse on the morning-dream sent me by my Guardian Sylphs: I was living on the Big Island (even as I actually think in a couple of years I may do), in a charming bungalow o'erlooking Kona Bay, behind which stretched a bit of Tropical Forest Primeval--ideal, my Sylphs were saying, for a chicken run. And as I woke, I was wondering aloud, in the bantering tone I often take with my Sylphs, if I really want to get into the grim business of chicken butchering, just to cut down on grocery expenses. And I bethought me of my maternal grandparents who, like so many of their generation, did just that, and prosecuted many other arduous, supposedly economical, farm-type enterprises as well, long after they had any real need to do so, and a good ten years after my grandmother's failing health--obesity, strokes, and diabetes--made it impossible for her to keep up with her share of the nuptial bargain. I happened to have been staying with my grandparents in the early spring of my eighth year when, for the last time, like any good, working farm couple, they "harvested" the year's growth of chickens: I helped corner the chickens, which my grandfather, using an old tree stump for a chopping block, beheaded with single, ferocious blows of a hatchet, and, when they had done running around and exsanguinating themselves, brought them into the kitchen, where my grandmother, with the help of her oldest son's wife, did the rest. The feathered dinosaur corpses were plunged neck-first, by their feet, into buckets of boiling water to loosen the feathers, then plucked, then singed, then eviscerated and washed, then wrapped in butcher paper and carried downstairs (mostly by me) to the vast freezer chest in the basement. In this, my grandmother's last hurrah as a working farmwife, the feathers were discarded along with the offal--buried by my grandfather in a corner of the chickenyard--but in years past, as many and many a pillow and feather-quilt laid up in the closets of upstairs bedrooms bore witness to, the feathers, or at least the downier portion of them, would have been saved, cleaned, and stuffed into pillowcase sacks (of which one or two were still extant in one of those upstairs bedroom's amazingly deep closets), awaiting the quilting and sewing industry, never more to be resumed, of long winter nights.