During our stay at the cottage in (Hope) Maine, celebrating our 11th anniversary, my husband John and I welcomed each morning – sipping coffee on the porch overlooking Hobb’s Pond and watching wrens, chickadees, finches, yellow-rumped warblers, downy woodpeckers and hummingbirds gather their first nibbles. We kept our eyes opened for eagles, which we were told frequent the area, but if one crossed our path, we didn’t know it.
What did cross our path, much to our astonishment, was a white turkey! Back home wild turkeys frequent our yard – often a dozen at a time, but neither John nor I have ever seen one that was white. According to a turkey expert, I learned what we saw was known as a smokey-phase wild turkey. They are in fact rare and are thought to comprise less than one percent of the wild turkey population. Maybe it was a smokey-phase turkey that Ben Franklin wanted for our National Bird!
From our morning porch view, we were also entertained by squirrels that climbed to the highest point of the pines and proceeded to systematically shake down pine nuts in earnest as if thinking about and preparing for winter. And then there was the call of the loons which pierced the otherwise silent morning and left us hoping to hear more of their song.
The nip in the air and hint of yellow, orange, and red against the deep green announced, without words, autumn was being ushered in.
It was magical.
On our last morning, I tried to absorb everything. I wanted to remember everything. My thoughts drifted to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, “Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?”
I set my coffee mug on the wood slab before me. The sun peered through the pines and stretched all the way across the pond seemingly ending in my coffee cup the way a rainbow ends in a pot of gold. I captured the moment with a picture.
When I looked at the photograph a few minutes later, I noticed what appeared to be a tiny light, a miniature sun, or an orb on the front of my cup.
I’m sure there is a scientific physics explanation about refracted light that would put this phenomenon into perfect perspective. of the day.
On the other hand, it could just simply have been a wink from the universe.