It was an early start to my day. I arose long before the sun did, and I looked forward to sitting down in silence to write.
In my house, silence is rare — after all we have four children we are homeschooling and 5 acres of wilderness we are trying to tame. It’s not an easy task, and each day is a struggle.
But this morning, something strange was beginning to unfold.
It felt like someone was narrating “The Night Before Christmas” inside my head. I did everything I could to figure it out. It was a sound I was unfamiliar with, something that startled me, but didn’t alarm me in any kind of way. I sat perplexed as I began drinking my coffee.
Having chickens outside of the house, we hear lots of birds in the morning. Sometimes, a bird doesn’t get in at night. Sometimes, the chickens attract other birds to the yard as well as our gardens. Either way, it is commonplace to have birds around the house. But this was not quite a bird sound — at least not one that I was familiar with.
I began poking around the windows, looking for clues or signs of what it was. Once the rest of the family was awake, the noise seemed to disappear or at least drown in the morning antics of family life.
Each morning usually starts with coffee and conversation, detailing the plans for the rest of the day. While the adults drink coffee, the younger ones usually try to sneak coffee and act older than they are.
But then there is fighting, incessant fighting because our little children cannot have coffee without sugar, milk and arguments.
I’m not sure what they’re arguing about, but they pretty much do it all day long. Someone pours too much of this while the other complains about the dishes not being unloaded from the previous day.
As much as I feel like I’m homesteading in my dream home, I quickly realize that nightmares are dreams too, and I’m really more of a referee or an umpire than anything else most of the time.
In the midst of all the morning commotion, even the bickering children stopped to ask what that noise was. That’s when everyone put their differences aside and started working together.
Eventually, tiptoeing down the long hallway toward the garage where we could hear some distinct chatter, we carefully opened the door.
What we found was nothing. Nothing at all. But that’s when our search became more interesting.
A couple of weeks prior we got turkeys. The turkeys were in a brooder with a light and a cover. When we closed the garage door the chatter began to get louder and louder. Quickly, without missing a beat, we reopened the garage door to find turkeys gobbling and scattering throughout the garage. When we stretched our necks out through the doorway to peek at them, they stretched their necks out and turned their heads to peek at us.
Gene Logsdon’s advice on turkeys is simple: Don’t! I understand his perspective, but they breathed some life in an otherwise moribund day.
