Sister Turkey

In a meadow bright with firewheels

and yellow daisies and paintbrush and bluebonnets, here is Sister Turkey looking for her breakfast. She always comes up from the woods and meadows to the south, where it is wilder and less settled and home to a great many deer and raccoons and possums. Likely, she has a nest nearby, where she's brooding five or six eggs, leaving them alone, carefully covered with grass, only to eat. She stalks thoughtfuly through the grass, unhurried, unflustered, not bothering to look up when I come out onto the porch to take her picture. Breakfast has her full attention.

We saw Brother Turkey the other morning, just after sunrise, his distinctive red wattle like a bright necktie at his blue throat; often we hear him gobbling, in that high-pitched, fluttery gabble that makes me smile but no doubt warms the heart of his lady-love--or loves, plural, since he is such a splendid fellow that he undoubtedly has a harem. Once, in another year, we saw a pair of them coupling, two brown shapes in the shadows of the tall grass, coming swiftly together and then apart. And two years ago, one of the hens brought her five turkey chicks--poults, they're called--to this same meadow, where they darted here and there on their lightning feet, feasting on grasshoppers. I came too close, and they rattled up from the grass, all five and their mother, and flew off in a noisy clatter and whirr of wings.

No writing today, but yesterday was good, and Saturday was very good. Today, Story Circle's Reading Circle, in Austin, where we read and talked about Sue Bender's Plain and Simple. Lovely book, lively discussion. Writing tomorrow, I hope, and the rest of the week.

Reading note, from Mary Oliver's poem "Moss":

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn,
I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing
upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

sweet cousin.