So, last week, we had a really nice unexpected spring-like day. The temperature rose into the 70s. The sun was warm. The mud dried up. The kids played outside. I went for a nice walk all alone. Beautiful. Really beautiful.
We opened all the windows and aired out our little house. Later on in the afternoon, I set the girls up in the living room with a story tape (Voyage of the Dawn Treader on CD) and went into my bedroom to sit in my rocker near the open window and read (Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, which I highly recommend, by the way.) I had been sitting for about five minutes or so when I heard a strange clucking noise outside the window. I set my book aside and looked out the window and this is what I saw:
Want me to zoom in on that a little bit? Here ya go:
A turkey! A wild fuckin’ turkey, just cluckin’ along through my yard on a Wednesday afternoon. At least, I’m pretty sure it was wild. No one showed up that evening asking if I’d seen their missing pet turkey or anything like that.
And what did I do? Like any good homeschoolin’ mom, I grabbed a camera, took pictures of it until the shutter-click sound drove it off to someone else’s yard, and then grabbed my field guide and looked it up.
I used to live in a nice big house in a Colorado suburb. I used to have a laundry room larger than my little not-modern country kitchen is today. But now, I live in a little rented farm house on 16 acres with deer moving through in the evenings, blue jays nesting in the spruce trees, a pair of cardinals starting a family in an old pine tree, chickadees all over the place, at least one fox, a country cat that likes to come to the porch at night and torment my cat, something that sounds Rather Large scuttering around in my attic late at night…
And one wild turkey.
This place is all right.
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