Turkeys, War, and Rings

 
"Are you awake?" I heard Paul say through my dream this morning. I was sitting in a filthy, small cafe in some university town wondering why they didn't sweep up the dust.

"No," I said groggily. Then I was in our bedroom, looking at the peeling paint above our red bookcase.

"Come, quietly, and look out the window." He was speaking from the bathroom across the hall from our second-floor bedroom. The bathroom overlooks the backyard: the dying apple tree, overgrown spruce, the stone retaining wall above which our land slowly ascends toward the old red maple sugaring house and the woods beyond.

"Look," he said, "turkeys."

I peered out the window above the toilet and there were nine dark turkeys scratching at bird seed that had fallen from the birds feeders on the apple tree. We had seen turkey footprints while snowshoeing over the weekend, and yesterday we had heard a strange strangled cry outside and came out into the front yard in time to see a turkey, with its dark, lumbering body, slowly fly from its perch in a tree behind Judy's house, across the street and over our heads to somewhere behind our house.

There is only one other time we have seen turkeys right in our own yard and that was, funnily enough, on Thanksgiving Day of 2007. It's the kind of thing Betty, my mother-in-law, would have delighted in. She lived in a house her husband, an architect, designed overlooking a beautiful valley, Nant-y-Glyn, in Northern Wales.She has been dead for almost a decade.

"That's not right," Paul is saying. We are in our front room with the Christmas tree lit (yes it must come down soon), "the Germans shouldn't machine-gun the survivors." He is watching a movie written by Noel Coward, In Which We Serve, in which survivors on a life raft from a bombed British destroyer think back on their lives before the war.

He recognizes a particular Anglican hymn they sing in the film and watching it, it's hard not to think about his father who was a bomb diffuser (or "sapper" as they were called) during World War II. While his father was diffusing bombs, his mother was working in a telephone office in Chester, England, near the Welsh border, and was one of the fire wardens: she ran to the top floor of the building to look for incendiary bombs. On one of these occasions, while washing her hands in the bathroom sink, her engagement ring slipped from her hand and fell down the drain. When I met her, in her 80s, she spoke often of her lost ring (Paul's father, Stewart, died some fifteen years before I ever had a chance to meet him) and I always had an image, like a cartoon by R. Crumb, of a ring trapped in a pipe in the middle of a building.

Along with my own wedding and engagement ring, I wear the wedding ring Stewart bought Betty to replace the one she lost. So strange, the journey this small gold ring with a delicate diamond has made from Northern Wales to Vermont. So many criss-crossings across the Atlantic, both seen and unseen, like large dark turkeys that roost somewhere in the trees near our house. We know they are there but we rarely see them.