Dear reader. I’ve promised to write a thousand words today, to myself and to a few other folks including the entire Universe of the internet. Well… those tuned to this channel anyway. And I have to be honest, my patience for this is waning. It’s day 10 and I’ve got a few new ideas but no desire to write through them. Three or four new ideas came to me just yesterday while I was busy moving through my small day. Thinking about trying to write about them now just feels exhausting. 

I read today’s #1000WordsOfSummer newsletter, and a half-hour later I can’t remember what it said. I went to my inbox for new poems and there’s more garbage from the Paris Review. Some long-ish thing that sounds neat, but really amounts to nonsense and I can’t help but think (again) how these people ever got in the Paris Review. How? 

I say I can write like that because it’s just a bunch of nonsense words smushed together and organized in neat three-line stanzas, but I probably can’t. At least not today. I’ve got to be honest and say I don’t like poems whose meanings are so obscure, only the writer knows what they mean AND again, they probably only got published in the Paris Review because they had already achieved some poet fame. You have to be brilliant and get noticed, and then you can start writing crap everyone assumes is brilliant because you wrote it. That’s how life works. 

This is it. Day 10 and I don’t wanna, but I’ve promised some words and I’ve also promised something about Turkey so here goes…

***

A few weeks ago a turkey showed up in our backyard. He just wandered about and when we moved closer to the windows with our phones up to snap photos from behind the glass, he got spooked and went the other way, around the corner, and out of sight. Bye Turkey. Everything new is strange and interesting. 

The next day, he came around again. This time it was near our bird feeder which is actually mostly a squirrel feeder and the squirrels are messy and the seed drops all over the ground. This is not new, but Turkey likes bird seed so he’s into it. It makes sense. Turkey is a bird after all. This time we were able to get better pictures before he got spooked off. 

Jim enjoyed seeing the turkey so much he got an orange bowel out and put more seed in it and set it on the patio. Sure enough, we’d look out the window and Turkey was there. Then, In the morning, there was more evidence that Turkey had spent considerable time on the patio. Turkey shits are quite a bit larger than other birds’. That makes sense too. 

Phase II begins when we start talking about naming Turkey. I mean, we could just keep calling him Turkey but that’s just boring and naming things is fun. We’ve named all the stray cats that wander through our yard–Bootsie, Slim, Puffy, Noir, Garfield, and Slinky, so why not name Turkey. 

Jim dares to suggest Tom and my eyes are rolling out of my head before he even finishes his sentence. “Oh gawd, no no no,” I said. I’ve noticed Turkey likes to lie down in the shade behind the two coolers that were left outside after our last party. I also got a song stuck in my head when Turkey kept appearing on the patio every day, “Guess Whose Back.” I said I wanted to call him Slim Shady. We briefly discussed what we should do about the giant Slim Shady shits on the patio and the conversation was a downward spiral from there. 

It’s just not practical to claim a wild turkey as a pet. They are wild, after all, and free to come and go as they please. It is pretty entertaining for the cats though, who like to perch themselves at various windows and watch him/her. 

Jim subsequently moved the orange bowl out to the back of the yard; still close enough that we could see from the kitchen windows. It’s just one turkey every day and I think it’s the same one and I wonder about that. 

Is he keeping our backyard oasis a secret from his turkey friends? Is he being greedy in hogging it all to himself–the easy meal, the freshwater stream, the shaded patio naps? Is he lost and separated from his rafter and if so, is he worried about finding them again? Is he deep in the weeds weighing his options–to stay and enjoy this easy life he’s found or go in search of his companions? And what about a mate. Slim Shady must surely have instincts to pair up and get busy right? Will he be lonely? And is he a he or a she? 

Nobody but me liked the name Slim Shady so that didn’t stick. As much as I’d like to think I run a dictatorship here, it’s actually a democracy. Jim declared Turkey’s new name was Wishbone, which I thought was dull and I countered with Chamberlain because his head looks like a Skeksis head and Chamberlain is the only name I remember.

We just don’t see eye to eye on this naming business, so Turkey is just Turkey. 

This morning while Jim was eating breakfast the ring doorbell we have on a door by the garages was going gaga. Turkey was setting off the motion sensor, which means he was in the driveway out front. Jim said it looked like he was wandering off in the direction of the back yard and I asked if the gate was open. He said, “no, but where there’s a wing, there’s a way.” I forget Turkey has wings and sleeps in trees. 

This actually makes me feel a little better, knowing he’s not trapped and can get away if he wants to. But I still wonder if he’s been separated from the flock and maybe he’s an adolescent and doesn’t know how to find his way back. I’ve seen turkeys regularly in other parts of town, but not here, so I just worry about that. 

Jim is in charge of filling the squirrel feeder each day and has no problem tipping a little into the orange bowel while he’s at it. We’ve had a few good downpours lately and Turkey’s “leftovers” on the patio have all washed away. Turkey is pretty reliable, returning each morning, enough that it’s not new anymore and everyone has lost interest in taking pictures. Even the cats don’t seem to care. 

Now it’s just a turkey. 

***

That’s it for now. The entirety of what I was thinking the other day when I was first thinking about writing about the turkey has been lost. I do know it was called “Stranger Than Fiction” and the essence of what I wanted it to be, but that’s about it. Imma git on with my Monday and see where that leads.

Ciao for now,
~Miss SugarCookie