Pullets, Laughing Our Way to Louisville
The road from Chicago to Louisville can seem longer than the five and a half hour drive the journey is supposed to take. Especially if you happen to run into a time-killing-slow-crawl traffic jam in the Chicago metro area. We’d been on the road for a while and were just past Indianapolis. Our joints were stiff from time in the saddle and we were hungry. Dusk settled into night and we took the off ramp. There was the yellow sign, a Waffle House was up ahead.
A traveling rule of thumb, when one begins to see Waffle 
House signs off of the interstate you know that you are crossing a boundary from the North into the South. The prospect of a waffle and eggs, while observing the grill man or woman work, seated among the local families, seemed apposite to our road weary mind and body.
The place was busy. Two female wait staff, in their late 20s were in constant motion, as was the guy at the grill, performing the ballet of order preparation. The process seemed well defined, thought out, routine,—yet with timing so critical to serving up in succession, that many different food orders…………. he worked with focus. He also maintained a positive spirit as I heard him apologize to a patron or two for not getting their order quite right.
Laura seated opposite me had a good view of the community bulletin board. She asked me, “What are pullets?” That is a term that I’d not heard in years. The flyer said “home grown pullets for sale.” Having been raised in the South I remembered the reference from my childhood. The Better Hens and Gardens website defines a pullet as “a young hen, specifically a hen of the domestic chicken less than one year old.” We could pick up some pullets while we are passing through…..I offered. She smiled and began to laugh. Here we were, a long way from Mundelein, considering an offer to purchase pullets. The incongruity struck us, and we began to laugh. The village of Mundelein has an ordinance which forbids the keeping of chickens within the village boundaries. We speculated that we might return with some Indiana pullets, prepared to insist that these were not chickens, they were pullets. Maybe we’d be in luck. Perhaps our mayor has never heard of pullets………?
We had a decent break from the road, and chuckled for the remainder of our trip into Louisville Kentucky.
