Full Moon Morn
The Harvest Moon is casting distinct shadows across the plains this week. I love moon shadows. Big Sister has taken to sharing my dawn vigils. How strange it is to share those hours with another human. . . The rare occassions when I do socialize during those quiet hours always feel too strange for synopsis. Those happen but not often enough for pat summary. They are simply weird and most often have some sort of crisis attached. Weird upon weird.
Big Sister has shared these hours with me for most of her 3.5 years, but that has been during grand parties and vacations. This Harvest Moon marks the first full moon cycle of the foster care arrangement. The siblings arrived during the full of The Barley Moon. The arrangement still feels more like our usual visits than routine, but part of what I hope will become routine is where Big Sister and I open the chicken coop on our way to the turkey yard. The young, new-to-crowing, buff orpington(?) rooster is beginning to look offended when we start crowing in his coop before he does. So far, he is the only identified rooster of the 16 young chickens. In the urban homestead, a rooster's crow inspires dinner plans, but rooster's crow sounds decidedly different in a 140 acre yard. His disposition has yet to be determined. I've wondered if I should hang Bully Rooster's pelt in the roost to keep him reminded of what happens to mean roosters. You don't get to bully my grandbabies, feather head! ! ! That's *MY* job. This rooster is around 3 times the size of Bully Rooster, but seems calmer so far. I think. Bully Rooster started crowing during the heat of the FIL's end of life crisis, so I missed most of his coming of age developments, including the assassination that allowed one of Hubby's co-workers to show off his marksman skills. I still havenae identified what breed Bully Rooster was. For sure, he was a mean little sucker, but he and his flock also suffered considerable neglect, including a rat invasion of their roost from the storage building in the neighboring yard which drove them into the trees. Over the course of the FIL's end of life drama, the entire flock met a sad demise I still havenae fully recovered from.
But here I sit indoors with all that marvelous moonlight a-shining. Time to get my Van Morrison on. "What a marvelous night for a Moondance." Big Sister has just informed me that it is time to wake up the lazy rooster.
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I love myself a Moondance and have fond memories of many. They have all been marvelous! Big Sister sounds like the perfect dawn companion for you and lazy rooster. I wonder if male turkeys have their form of crowing?
Getting a chance to help my daughter raise her twin girls from birth turned me from night owl to early raiser. We had a baby monitor in their room, at about 3 months old every morning they woke up chatting to each other for about ten minutes before they started thinking about breakfast. That was worth waking up to hear.
The infamous gobbling sound comes from the tom (male) turkeys. My internet wisdom tells me the females make a more subtle sound of which the descriptions are too diverse for clarity. I have yet to hear the sound myself. So far I still can't tell the toms from the hens and ALL of them still sound like baby chickens, even though they no longer look like them and are looking less like chickens every day. Feather babies do grow stunningly fast.
I still consider myself a 24/7 person. What hours of the day or night I am active depends entirely on where the action is, but whether I am just going to bed, just getting up or just rolling over with an apathetic groan, I havenae missed too many sunrises in my life. I canae seem to resist the sunrise action on any day or in any mood.
Yea, I think grands were designed for each other. Vessels in need of emptying and sponges in need of filling seem as fine a fit as nectar gatherers and plants in need of pollination. May the circle be unbroken.
Hugs Arfie.
I’ve been on a vacation to dissociation lands so I probably missed the moon. I did enjoy the illusions created by the red skies just before dawn this morning. It’s been a while since I’ve braved opening my blinds on the porch where I hibernate but it was brilliantly beautiful and turned the bluffs into an illusion of the Giza Plateau. It was worth opening the blind in my little corner.
I grew up to the sounds of Jakes as my dad is a devout turkey hunter, and it is the closest thing to religion he has. He hunts only for food and follows the Native ways of using every thing he can of his prey. He makes his calls out of the bones of turkeys and they are better than those from professional hunting stores. Both of my daughters are or rather were Junior Jakes. Sometimes I think my dad’s spirit animal is a big old turkey but he still refuses to talk about his sweat lodge experience and initiation to be allowed to hunt on the Navajo lands out West. One day..., still hoping he’ll tell me that story. I’ve been waiting to hear it since I was 8 years old.
But anyhow..., nostalgia.
Big hugs and love my friend.
The Harvest Moon is always worth seeing. Hugs.