It was another coffee-scented morning. I was sitting in my reclining chair and reading when I heard my cell phone vibrating on the writing desk across the room. Walking over to its charging station, I saw ‘Keith’ on the screen and picked up the phone.
“Hello, Sweetheart, is everything all right?” I asked my husband.
“Fine,” he said, “I’m here at Historicon and have met up with one friend, looking for another. I got your text – you want me to pick up the mail on the way home?”
“Um, yes, um, wait a minute,” I said looking out my den window and across the driveway. “We have turkeys.”
“Turkeys? How many?”
“Two, no three hens and four good sized chicks, no six. Oh my goodness, there’s another hen, and there must be a dozen chicks – more. They keep coming up the embankment onto the driveway.” I watched as the wild turkeys strutted and pecked their way across the driveway and into the meadow below the sentinel oak. One of the hens dropped and rolled, taking a dirt bath.
Earlier that morning I’d weeded more Japanese stilt grass out of the junipers along the driveway slope and in so doing, scared up several grasshoppers – feed for wild turkeys. The mother and child flock, now numbering a few dozen, helped themselves.
When Europeans first settled in North America, they found wild turkeys aplenty roaming the forests and grasslands. But three centuries of hunting and the clearing of woodlands resulted in a sharp decline of wild turkey populations. As these habitats recovered, starting in the mid-twentieth century, wild turkeys were successfully reintroduced. Click here for more information.
“Maybe Freya can catch one for us,” Keith said laughing.
“Maybe not – she’s under my desk snoring, but Heathcliff has seen them. He’s looking out the window and whining.” I detached the phone from its charger and shushed Heathcliff. “I’m going to take some pictures. See you later this afternoon.”
I didn’t dare venture outside, for fear of scaring them off, so these shots reflect the grain of window screens.
After a couple of minutes, the flock returned to the forest. Heathcliff curled in his nest bed, and I settled back in my reclining chair.
I paused to think about synchronicity, how the rattling sound of a vibrating cell phone provided an opportunity for me to witness momentary visitors strutting and pecking their way through life like all of God’s creatures.
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