Brother loved raising chickens

By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

A year ago today my brother John was buried. My sister Kate and I commemorated his death day on July 11 by putting flowers on his grave and we ate raspberry and cherry pie with our children. We ate pie because one of last things John could eat before he died was a strawberry rhubarb pie that my sister Mary, who lives in California, had sent to his house in Washington, D.C.

John died of pancreatic cancer. He owned his own law practice in Washington, D.C. His specialty was immigration law. Even though he lived in Washington, D.C. and loved his work, he missed Minnesota every day. His favorite place to walk was at the Antiedam Battlefield site in Pennsylvania. He liked its wide-open spaces and the wild flowers that bloomed along the river's edge, which reminded him of Minnesota.

Besides the wide-open spaces of the Midwest, John missed raising his own chickens for meat. He enjoyed eating home-grown free-range chicken. He went to graduate school at the School of International Living in Brattleboro, Vt. At the school he had to do a project and keep documentation on it. The project had to benefit the group that he was attending school with and the project also had to evolve and have transition.

John decided that for his project he would raise 100 baby chicks and then butcher them when they were 6 weeks old. He documented the growth of the chickens, kept track of his costs, how often he fed and watered them and at the end of the six weeks, his classmates helped him butcher the chickens. They grilled the chickens and celebrated eating them with beer, potato salad and baked beans. John's project of raising chickens met all the requirements for his project.

John would brag about how he was good at raising chickens. After he graduated from the School of International Living he moved to Alaska to teach. He brought along 200 baby chickens from a hatchery in New Ulm that he flew along with him when he went to Anchorage. I don't know what he taught in Alaska, but his students raised and butchered the chickens and he somehow graded them on it.

John didn't marry until he was 40 years old. When he and his wife, Judy brought a house in the D.C. area, one of the first things he did was convert his garage into a chicken coop to raise chickens. One of his neighbors heard roosters crowing and she called the police. John was issued a warning that there was an ordinance in the neighborhood against raising farm animals.

John was upset that he couldn't raise chickens anymore. He tried to make a deal with the neighbor that he would give her 10 chickens if she wouldn't make such a fuss, but she was convinced that chickens attracted rats and he couldn't persuade her to think differently.

That was the end of his raising chickens. My sister-in-law Mamik raised chickens for him one fall and she shipped them to him all butchered and frozen by Federal Express. She shipped so many chickens that John gave some of them out to his clients. I'm pretty sure that no other law office in the D.C. area gave out chickens to their clients when they came in for a consultation.

Besides chickens and wide-open spaces, John liked anything Western. He wore cowboy boots, though he never rode a horse, read Louis L'mour books, and he had a large collection of Western movies. His favorite actor was John Wayne.

John was a romantic, extremely opinionated, quick with quips and knew something about almost every subject. I miss his phone calls at 8 a.m. asking me how business is for Tom, and if Tom is burying anyone that John knew.

His son Juan Carlos, 13, and daughter Xiamara, 11, are coming to visit this late summer from Washington, D.C. I will feed them fresh chicken and we will take walks on the prairie so they can enjoy the view of the wide-open spaces of the Midwest that their dad loved so much.