Turkeys

I saw these wild turkeys a few days ago over at Lee's Gap. More than a dozen of them were strutting around what looked to be a very late planting of corn. I stopped the car, grabbed the camera, and climbed out. Some of them flew but others just ran around, or moved away from me. They seemed to know I was harmless.

The field is a just a hundred yards away from the edge of the "homeplace." This would be the farm where my maternal grandfather was raised until he was 15. His mother sold out and left after my great-great grandfather died at the age of 56. My grandfather also died at the age of 56, as did my mother. Sounds like some kind of curse, doesn't it?

My parents bought the farm directly in behind this one, and that is where I grew up. On weekends I would slip through the fence and trudge the same fields as my grandfather, picking up rocks and wondering if he had touched them, too. I scoured hills and forest glens for signs of him, or his parents, some acknowledgement that this land belonged to me, too.

I heard whispers in the wind and saw things in the clouds, and sometimes my imagination brought me voices carried on the backs of ants, or hushed in the trample of the deer hooves when I frightened them with my presence. I heard my ancestors call to me in tiny voices, crying for me to save them. But they have long been gone, and I am but a woman, anyway, and a silly one, at that.