The Crabapple Trees

I grew up on a farm as a wild, very tan girl with tangled hair and calloused feet.  Perhaps the most farm-ish thing I did was to go through a phase of wearing cowboy boots.  The cowboy boot adoration went on all of one summer.  White cowboy boots and overall shorts—I'm not sure quite what kind of an image I made.

One of the many endeavors we had on our farm was to try and raise turkeys.  My father and mother decided that instead of buying turkey for thanksgiving, they would just buy poults (baby turkeys) and raise their own meat.  My brothers and I were not opposed to this idea and welcomed the strange looking baby birds into our family readily—which was not exactly the kind of greeting my parents had planned on.

Turkeys are not really a very beautiful variety of bird, but we did our best to love them despite this flaw. We provided them with water and food, and probably more attention than a turkey has ever wanted.

Turkeys are heavy birds, they aren't meant to fly for long distances, but rather waddle through life rather awkwardly.  Our turkeys grew into their lumbering walk quickly.  At night we kept them inside of a chain-linked fence and then we would let them out during the day to go scavenge for food—turkeys like to eat bugs and grasshoppers and such.



In our yard we also had crabapple trees.  I think their purpose was to look nice in the front yard, but as a child it seemed to me that they didn't have a purpose at all—so I created one for them.  Crabapples could feed our turkeys.  My brothers and I spent a good ten minutes picking crabapples and filling a small plastic bucket with them.  To our delight we discovered that the turkeys did indeed like crabapples.

From the time we first adopted our turkeys they had always been rather friendly, but it was not until we introduced them to our crabapples that they became true pets.  They would follow us around, wobbling after us in a line, "gobbling." 

The time spent outside picking crabapples escalated until we were spending more and more time picking crabapples and more and more time feeding them to our four turkeys. The turkeys came to love us so dearly they would run out to greet us every time we walked outside, with or without the delightful crabapples in sight.

This energetic habit of our turkeys became somewhat of a problem.  Although we were not afraid of our turkeys—how could we be, we'd raised them—we had neighbors that became rather alarmed when the large birds came running towards them as soon as they entered the yard.  No matter how many times we explained how very friendly our turkeys were, the moment they began waddling, people became wary.  There was one particular neighbor boy who became so paranoid that he would scream and run back into our house as soon as he caught sight of them (or rather as soon as they caught sight of him).  We had to personally escort him out onto our driveway once so that he could get home because of the terrifying turkeys that patrolled our yard.  The turkeys made better guard dogs than our dogs.

We enjoyed a lovely, rather strange summer, we children and our pet turkeys, and then summer ended.

When November came we, as completely unloyal children, were ready to give up our pet turkeys for the cause of Thanksgiving dinner.  What surprised all of us, was that my mother had grown attached to the strange awkward birds.  She cried when we sent the turkeys away—and we children promptly forgot that we had ever had pet turkeys and found other things to keep ourselves occupied with.

To conclude: Thanksgiving dinner was very good, my mother could hardly bring herself to eat any of the meat, and we have never raised turkeys since.