deb roush

As the chief public relations executive for the local public school district, I’m the first to tell you that what you learn early in school dictates success in life. Still, for me, as a kid growing up in the early 1970s in Southern California, most of what I needed to know was learned outside of the classroom – in a chicken coop.

Yes, you heard me right. My grandparents, immigrant farmers from Belgium, Rene and Anna Moyens, settled in sunny Southern California. Eventually they set up shop in a suburb of Los Angeles — Sylmar, specifically — where, unconventionally, they transitioned into much of what they did in their motherland. They grew citrus trees and raised birds. Including my beloved chickens.

It wasn’t that I adored the chickens so much as I relished the time working side-by-side with my grandfather, Rene. A known late sleeper, I would rise before dawn to work side-by-side with him – cleaning the coop – which housed about 20 birds. With a large paint scraper I would carefully lift droppings, meticulously sliding them into a bucket, then transporting my collection to the nearby compost pile. Then I would carefully sprinkle fresh smelling sawdust over the coop’s floor to ensure picking up the droppings would be easy the next time. I gathered the chickens’ fresh, brown, warm eggs in a basket and fed the cluckers their grains and greens.

And while Grandpa appreciated my help – and my early rising – he didn’t let me miss a step. He pointed out when I missed a dropping – teaching me it was critical to do a job right.

When a favorite hen suffered an eye injury from what could only have been a jealous fellow bird, she was allowed free reign of the small, backyard “farm” area. Grandpa and I tended to Helen (who I named for Helen Keller, having recently finished reading her autobiography) by knocking our knuckles on her wooden feed dish so she would find her food. Grandpa taught me that it was important to tend to the “least of these” and care for the hurt or less fortunate.

I was terrified of Grandpa’s feisty and frankly, mean, rooster who thought he was top boss. Grandpa taught me to look him in the eye and show him who was top dog. It’s a skill I have executed many times since, albeit not with roosters. In the end, if I ran from the ferocious rooster, Grandpa saved me, scooping him up and reprimanding him in his native Flemish, sending me the life lesson that my family always had my back. That I counted and came first.

Grandpa loved his birds. And he loved me. That relationship was the grounds for choosing him, in fifth-grade grade, as the topic for my all-important paper to be titled, “My Hero.” It was then that I “interviewed” him, learning that as Belgian, my grandfather had been captured by the Nazis in World War II, but escaped their work camp using counterfeit Czechoslovakian papers. Grandpa was a true hero in every sense of the word, and that impressed me. Still, not as much as his ability to cluck and coo at a rambunctious cluster of chickens early in the morning, quietly calming them – and me.

Many years later, when I visited Grandpa in the hospital as struggled with colon cancer, he did what did what so many others who have spent a stretch of time on pain medication do: He hallucinated. And there was a plastic spray bottle in the room – with a trigger. I remember like it was yesterday Grandpa pointing at it and smiling. “It’s my chicken,” he said, seeing the trigger as the wattle under his bird’s chin.” I laughed. I cried.

It was in Grandpa’s beloved chicken coop I was prepared for success in life, by a man who most likely didn’t even know the effect he had on me. And while, perhaps, I didn’t recognize that influence until very recently, I must have know it subliminally. After all, my daughter, who was born in 1997, is named after him.

She is Rene Roush.