Who’s on Your Turkey Side?

One of us is the country mouse, and one of us is the city mouse. One of us can identify what’s growing in the fields, the number of hours left before darkness descends, and if it’s safe to approach an animal in the wild while one of us possesses other important life skills like parallel parking, navigating a grid of one-way streets, and procuring an Uber.

In this way, among many others, we’re a good team.

A year or two ago on a nature walk out behind my house, we spied a posse of turkeys up ahead in the laneway next to the woods. They weren’t very big, but they weren’t babies either, probably teens or young adults. No grown-ups in sight.

The city mouse said, “I’m scared.”

As the country mouse, it was my job to assure her that those baby turkeys were more afraid of us than we were of them, that they would go back into the tree line well before we got anywhere near them, and most of all, that it was safe for us to keep going.  

“If you say so,” she said, and we kept moving forward—corn field on one side, woods on the other, turkeys straight ahead.

Uncharacteristically, those turkeys didn’t seek refuge in the trees as we got closer and closer still. Instead, they stood belligerently in place, daring us to walk by their jutting chests and menacing beaks. They definitely had to be teenagers.

She stopped, looked around, realized we were trapped. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to keep right on going,” I said more authoritatively than I felt, and then I switched sides with her so I was the one closest to the bird gang as we scooted by. With our heartrates elevated and the turkeys avoiding eye contact, we came through the gauntlet unscathed.

“Thank you for taking the turkey side,” she said.

A few months later, at a particularly difficult department meeting, she voiced an unpopular opinion, and I backed her up.

“Thank you for having my turkey side,” she said afterward.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and of course acknowledged how she’s done the same for me many times. “Perhaps you might want to soften that before hitting send,” she’ll say about some of my emails, helping me take off the rough edges, reminding me how I used to tell my kids to “use their in-town voices.”    

This summer, another, even bigger posse of turkeys is collectively raising its young in the woods and fields surrounding my house. Just yesterday, the mothers and babies came into the yard, walked outside the labyrinth, dropped a fantastic feather. 

After they left, I picked up the almost foot-long brown and black artifact, and because it was our turn to walk the streets near her house and because I knew she would love having it, I gave the turkey feather to my friend, the city mouse.

“Every time I look at this,” she said, obviously touched, “it will remind me how you always have my turkey side.” And I know she always has mine.

Who has your back? Who’s on your turkey side? Feel free to share in the comments.    

Author: Terry Shamblin