Wild Things

While taking my dog for a walk in my neighborhood today, I saw the mysterious one-legged turkey that folks on the neighborhood e-mail list have been mentioning. Bailey and I rounded the corner, and there it was-- blue face and neck-- brown and grey feathers-- probably about 30 pounds-- just 5 feet away from us. The turkey did not seem to mind us. Bailey, however, was very curious. He had never seen a wild turkey before. He didn't try to charge it as he would have done if it had been a squirrel or a rabbit. He raised his ears, though, and kept looking back even as we moved on down the road. He let out a little "whimper" of a hello.

In the late afternoon, I took the children to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science. We walked the trails after visiting the exhibits, and we saw that the Pearl River is flooding the trail that leads to Mayes Lake. The children had been "wild things" all day as I had tried to work on organizing and cleaning-up the office. At the museum, they were curious and noticed things that I would not have seen like the new addition of brittle fish to one of the tanks. Normally, one child doesn't like part of a hike. Today, both enjoyed the entire journey, and I even caught them being kind to one another a few times.

Life is full of surprises-- one-legged turkeys, flooded trails, and siblings who still love each other after all. And, did I mention that I love walking in the woods? If my children had not desperately needed to get out of the house, I probably wouldn't have been hiking through the woods on this cool, spring day after several days of rain.