And When I Turned, She Was Already Gone

One morning this week I was working around my parents' yard with my mother. She sent me to put away the hoe and the rake in the shed while she dumped the weeds that we had just hoed in the fallow ground far behind the house. I went over to the garage to find her and as she heard my approach, she opened the garage door. I did my strong man impression that I've done since I was in the third grade. You know the one--- you grab onto the garage door as it starts it's way up the tracks and you put you legs into a lifting stance and then you contort your face into the teeth-baring-eyes-squinting-about-to-take-a-muscle-building-supplement-that-is-only-legal-to-buy-in-Canada look.

After this tomfoolery I heard an odd whooshing noise from the beet field across the road from my parents home. I turned quickly to see what it was. There was a blue-grey streak flying above the gravel road. It disappeared behind the line of pines before I was able to process what I had seen.

"Mom, that was amazing."
"What was it?"
"I don't know, some big bird with a long neck"
"Oh no! It had better not be another one of those turkey buzzards---One comes and if the eating's good then a whole bunch of them'll come. They're protected too! We had a bunch come around last last year"

By this point we had walked around the pines just in time to catch a glimpse of the bird slipping on foot beneath the pine tree that sits at the convergance of the pines and the lilacs.

It was huge. It was such a furtive creature. I felt something welling up in my stomach. The very words "turkey buzzard" caused an inkling of fear, but the majestic and enigmatic glimpses that I had caught caused a curiosity that over shadowed all of that aversion.

My mother and I ran around the lilacs and through the path that leads through the pines into the vegetable garden. Right there, in front of the old shed stood a blue crane. Upon seeing two figures much larger and scarier than it burst through the pine boughs, the crane flew off toward the south and was lost from view.

I will probably never see that piece of biological art again. But maybe in another mid-summer morning I will see her again. Maybe she can be my positive answer to the sailor's albatross. I would be okay with that.