When I was a little girl growing up in Chicago, my parents would take us on a family vacation every other year. We would drive 18 hours in two days to visit my grandmother, who lived in Virginia. My father had a specific regimen, and no one dare to break his routine. He would have us leave at 5 a.m., no matter how much we complained. He had a schedule to keep, and that was that.
However, we did have a few glitches in his well-oiled machine, also called a family vacation. One time we had already driven an hour and he thought he had left the coffee pot on. We turned around and headed back, only to find the coffee pot safely turned off, washed and put away.
Then there was the time that my mother, who always went grocery shopping the night before, fried us some delicious chicken to take with us in the car. I overheard her tell my dad that she got three whole chickens on sale and just couldn’t resist cooking one of them for the trip. This particular day, the weather was exceptionally hot, a balmy 102 degrees. As we approached hour four of the drive, a terrible rotten smell over took the interior of our 1977 Chrysler New Yorker. We immediately pulled over and had a mechanic check under the car, thinking we had hit an animal and its guts were rotting in the heat.
The mechanics found nothing, so off we went down the road with what seemed like a billow of rotten green film following behind us and inside the car. At one point It got so bad that flies started to appear in the back seat. No matter how many times we let down the window to have them fly out, within an hour there were six or seven more flies.
It literally smelled like we were harboring a dead body somewhere in those light blue leather seats. We could not escape the smell. It started to permeate our clothing and hair. When we stopped at a gas station and I went inside to use the restroom, a little girl told her mother, “That girl smells like a skunk.”
By the time we reached my grandmother’s house, my brother and I ran from the back seat, gasping for fresh air. Although my mother thought we were exaggerating, she too quickly exited the vehicle at record pace.
My grandmother was stunned when our family smell greeted her nostrils, but she held a straight face as my father told her we could not find the source of the stench.
My parents and grandmother had finished unpacking the suitcases from the car trunk, when my grandmother said she saw something tucked in the rear of the trunk. My dad reached in and pulled out a slimy, maggot-covered, raw, rotten whole chicken.
One of the chickens fell out of the grocery bag and decided to take up residence in our trunk and make the trip to Virginia, acquiring some maggots, which turned to flies on the way there.
It took several days of washing and rewashing our clothes, the trunk and backseat of the car to get that horrible smell to leave. As for my mother, every trip after that one, she bought the chicken, already cooked, from a local fast food place.
