Turkeys

I had been watching this flock for several days. They'd been working across the ridges and down in the hollows for days. I could hear them quite clearly this morning, so I stayed inside, and about 9:30 they got to what passes as my yard (loosely described as the area I can see) and I could watch them closely. Sixteen or twenty of them, it's very difficult to count turkeys because they rarely stop moving. They posted a couple of guards and the rest of them started rooting around like hogs in the underbrush. They're incredibly noisy when they feel safe, but when one of the guards gives the 'danger' vocalization they're all instantly quiet and on full alert. I love them. When they move through an area it's looks like a mini-tornado has passed. It's exhilarating to watch them. The wildest of the wild. Everything is anti-climatic after watching turkeys in the morning. Scattered snowflakes are an accent to the day and I'm struck with the fact that they both signify and don't signify. Now I have a kind of spatula I cut from clear plastic, a crude implement, that I store outside, so that it stays cold, on which I can catch snowflakes and look at them for a second or two. They are quite beautiful. Which leads to consideration of fractals, and then to a discussion of beauty. "My nose, Sir?" Or Beckett at the end with just a mouth. Truth and beauty are strange bed-fellows, usually it's one or the other. I wrapped a sweet potato in foil and put it in the back of the firebox, then stuffed the heart with minced shallots and baked it on a bed of onions with red wine. Made a very nice onion jam out of the drippings. A non-traditional Thanksgiving meal, but quite good. I ate at the island, with a nice fire behind me, and a large book opened to an early map of Florida. There are times that a map is better than text. This one, 1780-1800, it's hard to be exact, is correct, for the most part. I know the middle part of the St. John's River very well, and there is a hook of land, south of Greencove Springs, that has always been known as Catfish Point. I once camped on the opposite side of the river and ran drifting hooked jugs baited with chicken guts, and made $87 one night, which was the most I had ever made in a single day up until that time, and thought then, that what I wanted to do was live on the river. I'm wiser now, but I still wish I had. Mindlessly filleting catfish looks pretty good, the alternative is what? voting for one crook over another.