Turkey PM

Talking Turkey

Just in case we were lulled into sweet oblivion, fooled by balmy temps in the high 60s, the golden sun, the flowers in the little courtyard faded but decidedly there. Just in case we thought maybe this year we could keep the storm windows up a while, let the serious sweaters and gloves remain in the dark closets, the closed trunks. Just in case we forgot ourselves, nature gave us a comeuppance this first weekend in November.

Yesterday’s torrents of rain from the coastal Nor’easter tore flurries of leaves from the maples and dogwoods, splatting them on windows and doors and across the once green yards, the black roads. The wind blustered and roared all night, and this morning, the rain turned to snow, the kind of snow you see in March: wet, fat-flaked, fickle. And the temperatures fell, and Boris, the furnace, swooshed to life.

Last week, in the halcyon days of late October, I heard click-clacking sounds outside the open kitchen window and thought maybe one of the neighbors was working on his house. But this wasn’t the sound of home repair; it was a strangely living sound. So I looked out the back door and there was a whole family of wild turkeys just a few feet away staring back at me, as if to say, “Who the heck are you?” Or maybe, “What does a hungry turkey order for lunch around here?”

The wild turkeys are all over the little town where I live. I’ve seen rafters of them since spring when the little ones were trailing behind their mothers, and I’ve watched them grow into adolescents, gawky and reckless. Now they’re all big and quite comfortable living among us, crossing Main Street with a swagger and barely acknowledging me when I ride by on my bike. Lots of people don’t like them, but I do. They bring wildness into the everyday and wonder and a peculiar kind of grace. I stare at them and time stops, the day rearranges itself.

I read that they sleep in trees or even on rooftops, and I wonder where they’re sleeping this afternoon when the wet snow falls and the day closes an hour earlier. The interminable short day, I call it, when the clocks are turned back an hour, and the darkness sets in by 4:30 and the day is over but it’s not at all. On this particular day with the snow dripping and the grayness thick as a handknit muffler, the darkness began with the dusky light this morning that barely whispered through the lace curtain.

Just in case we’d forgotten, it is November. I wonder what the turkeys have to say about that.