Post-Snow Pea Census

After a couple days of bone-chilling cold and bitter northern winds, the temp climbed enough yesterday to result in hours of hypnotic snowfall. Jack Blizzard has cleaned up the dingy brown of prairie winter with a beautiful blanket of white. A good snow muffles sound, too, so the Row is exceptionally quiet today. I’ve got a batch of bison jerky in the dehydrator, a pot of vegetable soup cooked up, two hats and a pair of fingerless gloves to finish knitting, and—argh—a late faculty evaluation to get done.

Ray was out early with the snowblower, making peacock paths. We lost another of the ABBA boys sometime over the past two days. He’d been limping around on legs that looked broken or splayed, until finally, he wasn’t able to roost or make it to the food. Ray found him this morning, a peasicle tucked out of the wind behind the bird food can. He’ll go in the burning cage later today, ashes to ashes. So now we are 13.

I’m not pining, though. Mom reminds me that had the pea-boy lived, I would have done myself in trying to rig up some sort of pea-walker to help him get around. And when I run the numbers in my head—6 peacocks when we moved in, 13 now a year-and-a-half later—it’s scary. I have visions of myself wandering the acreage one day…I’ll be reading poetry, dressed only in peacock feathers, nibbling on gamebird pellets, with 2 panting dogs and 150 high-stepping peafowl in tow. I’ll lose my capacity for human vocalization. I’ll scratch up grass seed with my overgrown toenails. I’ll sleep at night perched on the footrail of our brass bed frame. Tourists will drive by slowly, hoping to catch a glimpse of the “crazy peacock lady.” Poor Ray will have to arm himself against the reporters crouching in the brush, their high-powered telephoto lenses perched on tree branches.

X-Treme nurturing seems hereditary in my family—my mom keeps her mail carrier supplied with Chex mix—and it could very well be my undoing if Jack Blizzard and Mother Nature, in their infinite wisdom, didn’t occasionally step in to even up the scales. But Ray carved out a beautiful path to the pyramid building, so I’ll ponder life’s amazing tendancy toward balance as I head out to feed the barn cats…