Wild Turkey Display

I closed my eyes and pulled the sleeping bag over my eyes. In the dark, I listened to waking birds: a whippoorwill, crows, a mockingbird. I didn't have to be blind to appreciate these sounds. I vowed to practice listening every morning to the music of the living world.

We bought the land from a man whose son was blind. He needed the money more than the land, the father said. "Are you sure?" I asked twice because knowing how my soul craved this land, I couldn't imagine anyone selling it. My vision may be failing with age, but I can't comprehend blindness--never seeing this winterized brown bowl blooming under the April sun.

Cowbells and the lowing of cattle remind me of travels to distant lands, but I was waking this day on our new land in the hard bed of a new truck. We had survived the first night with no invasion by raccoon or  bear, no bright eyes peering over the truck bed wall, no critters sharing our space.

Deep in my mind and working toward paper were plans for a house. I sat up, wrapping in a blanket as hickory leaves overhead slid against one another like soft pages turned by a breeze.

Sun lit the western bank of the bowl where gold and black butterflies were having a field day over the spray of oxeye daisies. I knew as Traylor awakened how the sights and sounds would delight him but couldn't have anticipated what we were about to witness.

Just as he sat, sleepily raking fingers through his hair, a wild tom turkey strutted out of hiding in the bank of trees at the property line. Out into the clearing he pranced, embossed by sunlight, and as he strutted closer, shaking his bright red wattle with a "gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble," he puffed up and spread his feathers in a grand show. He turned and paraded his float this way and that, seemingly aware of a female in hiding somewhere.

 

Traylor silently moved to uncover the camera, but the strange click of the focus startled the tom and he bolted, shrinking as he folded, down the steep bank in long strides. Having missed a great photo, we shared a moment of sheer pleasure in the natural world, something lost in 30 years of city living.

Without vision, what would life be? All gobble without the show. It would have been as lovely as the first sounds I heard as I woke, but we would have missed so much. I love the blessing of sleep and a noisy awakening, but I am also grateful for the gift of sight and the ability to store that picture in my mind.





Thanks to another photographer, here's a photo...