WILD TURKEYS
About a month ago a flock of wild turkeys moved into the neighborhood. I think they settled in the marsh. But they make regular forays to our yard. I’ll be sitting here in my studio and look out and there they are, all seven of them, grazing in our front lawn. Last week they moved to the back yard. One of them flew up to roost on the rail of the deck outside my studio.
They are large birds and magnificent in a kind of ugly-beautiful way. And I am obsessed with them.
Just as, the last time Hillary ordered a shipment of chickens, I was obsessed with them.
For weeks after they appeared in our lives, I’d go to our basement to stand over a large carton that he had fashioned into a makeshift nursery and I’d watch the process of life unfold beneath a heat lamp.
The chicks – thirty of them – arrive in the mail from Iowa, shipped across the country in a box measuring no more than one square foot. The fact that living things can be mailed across seven states and arrive peeping at the post office astounds me. The truth is, from the git go, I was against the enterprise, but as soon as I saw them, I was hooked.
They were two groups. The business part of the flock were the twenty-five Red Stars, absolutely guaranteed to be layers and produce eggs year round. The beauty part, if you can wrap your mind around the concept of chickens as beautiful, were an Egyptian Fayoumis, two Golden Campines, a Buff Minorca, a Black Australorp and one “Rare Exotic Chick” which the folks at McMurray Hatchery threw in free with the order.
Hatched the day before they arrived, the baby poultry huddled beneath the red glow of the heat lamp, looking nearly boneless beneath their yellow fluff, like marshmallow Easter peeps. They felt weightless as smoke in my palm.
The first weeks they were in residence, I’d go down to check on them and monitor the temperature two or three times a day. Before I knew it I had been standing there for a half-hour or more. Watching what? I mean these chicks were the poultry counterparts of a newborn human. They slept, woke, dipped their beaks in water, ate their feed, cheeped a bit, then gathered in the corner beneath the lamp to nestle again into sleep. Not exactly the Six O’clock News. Or Law & Order, for that matter. Still I watched.
By the end of the first week they were sporting the first feathers, which sprouted at the tips of their wings. I marveled at the perfection them, like miniature white angel wings. The tail feathers were next. And then the tiny beginnings of combs.
The more carefully I observed, the more I saw distinct differences. Two or three of the flock developed their tail feathers several days before the others. These same two were the first to display the red feathers characteristic of their breed. Some were bolder and would come to investigate and peck at my wedding band when I offered my hand. Another one – the free Exotic - was bossy, elbowing her way to the food tray.
As I watched the chicks, I was reminded of Flannery O’Conner and her obsession with her pea fowl. In “The King of the Birds,” one of my favorite chapters in “Mystery and Manners,” O’Conner writes, “As soon as the birds were out of the crate, I sat down on it and began to look at them. I have been looking at them ever since, from one station or another, and always with the same awe as on that first occasion…”
I understand O’Connor’s fascination with her fowl, just as I do Barbara Kingsolver’s interest in Buster, the hermit crab who lived in the writer’s Tucson home and about which she writes in “High Tide in Tucson.” And Annie Dillard’s hunger to explore the natural world. And mine with turkeys and chickens, however they come into my life.
Writers are lured by nature. In Kingsolver’s words, it draws us away from the “clutter of human paraphernalia and counterfeit necessities” and anchors us in the “genuine business of life on earth.”
Nature slows us down. It calls for our attention with ferocious storms and the delicate architecture of narcissi and the stiff-winged flight of a red hawk. It bedazzles us with the tapestry of a peacock’s tail and the flailing progress of an inch worm and with Buster the hermit crab who, sequestered in the southwest, continues to live by the tidal time of his native shore. When we slow down and notice the details of life, everything comes alive. There is mystery and majesty in ordinary things.
Nature connects us. To the earth and to each other. It schools us to pay attention, to look more deeply. It wakens us to “the genuine business of life.” This attention we bring to our writing. We learn to slow down, to allow time for ideas to incubate. We pay strict attention to specifics, knowing that concrete detail is what makes a story spring to life. Around us, the world offers a rich metaphor of the spirit.
In my basement, chickens once sprouted angel wings. On my deck, the wild turkeys astound.