By BILL MILBY

 

Sorry I was absent last week, it was a unique Thanksgiving at our house.   I hope you’ll excuse me after reading this column.
It all started several months ago when my animal-loving brother in law decided to deliver a flock of day old turkey’s to us after hearing that my daughter paid a small fortune for a free range heritage turkey last Thanksgiving. He thought we’d make a proverbial “Small fortune” on free range turkeys.
So, for the last several months I’ve been nurturing ten baby turkeys and being very proud of the fact that we only lost one of the original ten left to our care. Once I got them weaned them from their high protein baby food (do you have any idea how much food growing turkeys eat? So much for the small fortune!) I settled into a routine of supplementing their foraging with 2-3 feedings a day of cracked corn.
All of us at the farm have been enjoying these turkeys more than you can ever imagine even talking to them with a gobble-gobble here and a gobble-gobble there just as if it were Old McDonald’s farm. And the best part is that they would answer right back. Of course all the time we’ve set our pallets for some free range turkey that my daughter has been bragging about.
But then a couple of weeks ago, a culinary tragedy occurred in the kitchen: a plumbing fitting sprung a leak under the floor and made an unbelievable mess out of the kitchen including the hard wood floors we had just refinished last year. Everything had to come out, right down to the floor joists and wall studs. Ever since that happened we’ve been racing against the clock to have things ready for Christmas thinking we’d have to call off Thanksgiving at the farm this year.
But my grown kids almost cried over that prospect of no Thanksgiving at the farm so my wife relented and our contractor was able to gather a temporary sink for her and mount it on “sawhorses” so to speak. And so with that green light the kids started to invite their special friends which is always what we want them to do.
Things started looking up again for Thanksgiving at the farm. I forgot to mention that we had no room for a table. No matter, because God gave us such a picture perfect day, we were able to move a couple temporary tables out to the deck where we arranged seating for fifteen.
Now here comes the good part. On Wednesday, my son came to the farm to “Prepare” a couple of the turkeys but they were gone. So he saddled up the four wheeler and searched all over the farm for several hours (they really are free to go wherever they want but always come to get their cracked corn treat) but the turkeys were nowhere to be found………..until, he pulled out of the driveway   saying “I’ll just  roast the “Store bought turkey in my freezer” (David has been the official family turkey roaster for a few years now). Then, almost as soon as he left, the turkeys mysteriously re-appeared.   Who said turkeys are dumb?
Then to top it all off, they gobbled and paraded their puffed up feathers all around just a few yards away from where we were feasting Thursday on that “Store bought bird”. It was as though they were intent on getting “The last gobble with their beaks and feathers as high in the air as they could get them.
So there you have “The Turkey’s Revenge”! We’ll see what happens at Christmas.
Thanks for reading All About Seniors. I hope your Thanksgiving was just as wonderful ours.
See you next week.
Bill Milby, CSA, is a Certified Senior Advisor and a Director of Visiting Angels® of Macon, a non-medical, living assistance service for seniors. If you have questions or comments about this column you can reach him at william.mercylink@gmail.com or search for us at www.facebook.com/VisitingAngelsMacon.