As usual, I was hunkered down in the attic, transported and mesmerized by my latest piece of found treasure. I was in the midst of fine wine, some literary brilliance, and endeared by the smell of old paper and ink, borrowed and used from the library. Just as I was marveling at the fall foliage of the trees around me, in the midst of a walking path to somewhere unknown, but anticipated; I was jolted out of my adventure by some preternatural, substrate of sound. I ran toward the back window of the attic, and looked out the window and was in utter shock by what I saw. Aghast and forlorn, mouth open and wonderstruck, I stood holding my book, with the fantastic portal lost as I had held it clenched fisted in my hand.
There before me, heading out from the left flank of an almost two-acre plot of cleared land were turkeys, wild turkeys! They screamed absolute bloody murder! Yet, I couldn’t be sure, as they were turkeys? I stood there while they ran full throttle toward my window. I opened the window. I wanted to see and hear more. I did. There were loud guttural noises of a mass of wild turkeys, jarring and upsetting; yet interesting and majestic.
How many times had I tramped through the wild woods toward that seemingly touchable, but the unattainable purple mountain in my backyard? I would only find myself as far as the nearby creek with eels and slippery rocks. All this time, wild turkeys lived in our midst. It was mesmerizing and real. I watched them run all the way to… I have no idea? They never came to our full-on back yard. They veered off, back into the woods, a cacophony of absolute distress. I was their witness, yet I have no idea who I was supposed to tell. Yet, I’m sure I was supposed to tell. I still hold their presence vivid in my memory. They are a part of me, and I wonder if they knew that I was a part of them. All these years later, I tell their story.
Beautiful wild turkeys ran through my backyard when I was not yet even old enough to know it was a siren. Beautiful wild turkeys shared their glory with all that surrounded them in upstate New York. They were glorious and magnificent and so very necessary for my existence. Beautiful wild turkeys living ‘their best life’! They were my neighbors, yet they didn’t feel comfortable to let me know it, at least not until it was an emergency. Beautiful wild turkeys lived behind the forest that sat between me and that incredible inescapable purple mountain, and I am in awe of their existence.
