An Evening in Early March

It’s Sunday. These past weeks have been warm for this time of year,  but today the weather has snapped back to what we expect: a stinging cold. The spruces look sharp against the clouds in the sky, and the bay, on a rising tide, is smooth.

I am driving from town past the grey farmhouse on the left, and on the right, the open field. Up ahead, at the side of the road, I see a neighbor running.  Three weeks ago he had an operation for a meniscus tear in his left knee, and I am surprised to find him out running this soon. He’s wearing a yellow jacket, a red wool cap, a lime green vest, and black tights on his long, thin legs. I watch as a sudden squall of snow bends like a wing above his head and across his shoulders. It came as if out of nowhere, or as if pulled from one of the clouds overhead by his bright clothes and his strong, even stride. When I look again, it is gone.

On the passenger seat beside me I’ve got the Sunday Times and a pretty good bottle of Spanish wine. Obviously, I’ve no plan to run. My plan is to lie on the couch, read the paper, uncork the wine. And so I wave to him, turn into my driveway, into the shadows of the softwoods, and pull up at the clearing where my house sits, catching the light left in the day.

Inside, I set down the paper and the wine and stand at the window watching a hen turkey, who has spent a good deal of the winter here, emerge out of the woods and direct herself toward the house.  She’s lame. She walks by lifting her right foot in an exaggerated gesture, thrusts it ahead, and sets it down.

Birds walk on their toes. Most of what we see of a bird’s leg is the elongated foot with the same joints going the same ways as our own. On this hen, just at the place on the right foot where the tarsal bone fits to the bones of the toes, her toes curl under like a fist. She is two years old, and some neighbors and I have fed her since she was a jenny - a youngster -whenever she appears in our yards.

Her group of hens left her after the first snow this year. Or maybe she left them. In the fall, every time I watched them troop across the field in a line, she brought up the rear, rocking along. But she is a determined soul. Now she spends her days near my house, or she walks through the woods to be near a neighbor’s house. She preens. She watches every movement around her, perks at every sound. Sometimes, when I look into the trees in the woods on a sunny day, I see her resting in the leaves on the ground, or she is balancing on a fallen log above the snow, her head tucked back, asleep.

I’ve been working on a piece of writing these last two years. Taking quick breaks, I gaze out the window, and I find myself checking for this hen. For me, in a time of quiet work, she is a companion, and I wait for her each morning, with the wish that she made it through the night. I have grown to count on the way she holds tight to her life.

When I see her approaching now, I step outside with a yogurt container of cracked corn and sunflower seeds and toss it in her direction. She is a wary bird, and at this rain of food, she skitters aside, and waits stiffly, until I return to the house. Then she eats. When she has had enough, she moves toward where cedars and spruces open into a narrow corridor of green.  She hesitates. She looks around. The field is bare. The sky is empty except for the steel-colored clouds. It is getting quickly dark.  

Just before the trees, she lifts on tiptoe, her wings go out and up: a high quick double flap.  For courage against the dark? For this life – any way it comes?  I have no idea. Perhaps both. I watch her fold her wings back into herself and walk into the trees and disappear.