At this time of year I often think
of our first country-grown, free barnyard rambling turkey. Our neighbor, a
quarter mile down the road raised a few hundred turkeys for the locals in the
Thanksgiving season. He also raised Hereford beef cattle that grazed and
lounged on the hill outside our east-facing kitchen window. And milk cows, large
Holsteins, housed in the big old Sears designed white barn across the road from
our newly built homestead.
After a grueling year surviving the
near-tragedy of moving in too soon to our unfinished house, we were finally
living upstairs. Joel built bedrooms for the children in the walkout downstairs
while we slept in the upper level.
The story of the turkey as described in
the book, A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy
Granola Changed My Life goes like this:
One moonless night we woke to strange
sounds outside our window – rustling grass and deep animal sounds. Trying hard
to draw up some light from the darkness all we could really see right outside
our window were free form white shapes moving slowly one way and another. The
sounds intensified - deep low grumblings – as if the mass of whatever it was,
was growing. The white spots lurked around all the south side windows. Joel
grabbed a small child’s baseball bat and lantern flashlight. In a surprise move
he flung open the door only to see several large startled Holstein cows staring
back at him.
I called our farmer neighbor who seemed
grateful to be notified of his naughty girl cows. At two o’clock in the morning
we helped round up the giant explorers and escorted them back across the street
to their barn.
We talked into the sunrise about how our
urban roots had not prepared us with enough data to determine the mystery of
floating free-form white blobs attached to heavy animal snorts.
In late November, about a month after
our strange encounter with errant Holsteins, we heard a light knock at the
door. Our farmer neighbor sent his shy young 15-year-old son to deliver a
22-pound freshly harvested, cleaned, and bagged turkey for us. “Here’s this,”
he almost whispered as he plopped the big bird in Joel’s grasp.
We were equally as grateful for this big
thank you compared to our small neighborly gesture of rescuing cows. We have
yet to find another Thanksgiving turkey to match the incredible taste of that big
Tom. In the years following we discovered that all subsequent Thanksgiving meals
remain attached in our minds to the confusion of ghostly grumbling forms in the
night.
No matter how you celebrate the
launching of this holiday season, we wish you opportunities to enjoy the
mysteries around you, and a place of comfort to tell the stories.
If you want to read more about our
country life discoveries, you’ll find lots of humor and insights in A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy GranolaChanged My Life: 2.99 Amazon Kindle. We hope you check it out.
Affectionately,
