The small drama of a sprinting turkey

It’s more silhouette than photo, the one I took last week of my pure-black senior cat, Pippa. She is on a windowsill in the guest bedroom, looking at a quilted cat given to us many years ago. The backside is white, and we’ve always kept it in a window, and often someone would say, “We drove by your place and saw your white cat Barney in the window.” When Pippa stretches on the floor in the sun, one notices many undertones of brown in her black fur. Hairdressers, take note.

For a number of weeks, I’ve encountered a single turkey hanging around a ditch on my graveled road. Usually, she simply flies off, in that low-to-the-ground way turkeys have, but last week, she stepped out of her hiding place, likely protecting eggs, and she hit the road running. I slowed to keep pace. For anyone seeing the scene, it would have been hilarious, a turkey acting the part of a roadrunner, sprinting down a road at 3-5 miles per hour, ahead of a smiling old man following in a car. After more than a hundred yards, she entered the ditch, probably exhausted but, thinking I was a threat, keeping me away from her safe place.

There is a rhythm and cadence in the life out here, sometimes a fast waltz of a turkey sprinting down an empty road, and sometimes the mournful, melancholy songs of their inevitable death. I imagine wild animals don’t do much planning before they die, but I do. A lovely friend is one of my eventual executors, and she encourages me to pare down, divest, and just generally get rid of stuff. It’s not a selfish thing, as whatever I own can be easily dealt with by someone so capable, but she is correct. So I slowly go through boxes of papers, photographs, all of the things that make up a life. Last week I encountered a sort of diary my wife was keeping five years before she passed, a diary not meant for others. In one entry, she was clearly delighted that she had been accepted into an Alzheimer’s clinical trial at Rush Medical in Chicago. She wrote, “I want to do something, and this gives me the chance to be a participant in finding a cure.” She wrote those words to herself. The magnificence of it is humbling. I know the little diary will hit the landfill when I am gone, but for now, it’s a part of me.

Last week was busy. A dear friend and I attended a dress rehearsal of an absolutely glimmering production of the exquisite ballet “Swan Lake,” set to the music of Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. With full cast and orchestra, it was an extraordinary event, one that took me by surprise. I’m not an expert on dance, however, I have had the good fortune to see some of the best dance companies in the world, in places like London, New York City, Oslo, and Chicago. This production of Swan was somehow different from the others, more meaningful, more colorful, and satisfying.

Whenever I see dancers, I vow to lose weight and increase my strength so that, if called upon, I can lift my partner and dance across the stage. Fortunately, I’ve only received that call once. When a local funeral home arrived at my house to pick up my wife after she passed on Christmas Eve a few years back, they brought a stretcher into my kitchen, and it became clear that furniture would have to be moved in my living room to make room for it. Instead, I lifted her from the couch and carried her into the kitchen, laying her gently on the stretcher. Some months later, the funeral home director said to me, “For the rest of my life, I will remember that scene, you carrying your wife.”

We all live these little dramas every day, seldom noting them in a diary, or understanding that someone bore witness. But every once in a while, there are scenes bigger than ourselves, scenes we do not fully appreciate or understand, scenes about lovers who take care of each other to the end, or lovers in a long-ago ballet destined to die together, beautiful music and marvelous magic accompanying them on their way.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald has published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here.