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| My Name's Penny. I'll Be Your Peahen on This Trip |
She's a startling fowl with her nugget sized head, lumbering body, and perpetually perplexed expression. Frost clung to her weather-beaten wings. The wind whipped the paltry crest feathers clinging to her head. She looked bedraggled and miserable. It was love at first sight. We'd never seen anything like her. She waddled around the garden eyeing us while we tried to woo her. Give us an animal in distress and we're putty.
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| Seeking Refuge From Foul Weather |
As our circle of local friends widened we asked questions about the bird. Everybody in this village knows everything about everyone else, and Penny had been hanging around for a while. Someone must know how this lone peafowl got here.
'There was a break-out from a breeder's place over in Baltonsborough a few years ago,' we were told. I pictured a huddled mass of peafowl plotting a great escape. 'There used to be two but Penny's mate was electrocuted by a sheep fence,' someone else said. That tugged on our heartstrings... a tragic peafowl love story, now only a heartbroken hen left, never to know the joy of parenting peachicks. She had us wrapped around her gnarly claw. 'We call her Doris,' another neighbour chimed in.
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| Don't Think You Can Ignore Me! |
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| I'm Coming In |
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| Penny Well Fed |
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| Thanks so Much for Planting These Seedlings for Me |
One day, instead of hanging around outside the house, Penny headed down the road. Husband watched her, crestfallen. 'Where is she going?' She began to disappear each day, only coming back to roost at night. 'Someone's feeding her something she can't resist,' he said, 'they're trying to woo her away.' Husband started buying fancy seed mixtures. 'No!' he said to me in the pet store, 'Don't get the black and white sunflower seeds, she only likes the all black ones.' Still, she kept wandering off. 'Pea-slut', he muttered under his breath as she lumbered down the road.
One morning last May a big bounding Dalmation loped onto the property. Penny's honks of distress blasted through the entire village. We raced out of the house in time to see Penny's bulbous butt airborne, like a feathery dirigible flying across the street. She landed on the rooftop of a neighbour's house. That was it. She didn't come back. Husband was bereft. We could hear the nightly sound of her taunting honks from trees elsewhere in the village. Friends visited. 'Where's the Peahen,' they asked. 'Gone,' Husband answered sadly.
When my mother died we decided we would go to Canada for a while to help out my dad. A week before leaving, after an absence of three months, Penny showed up. Husband was thrilled to see her. 'What will she do when we're gone?' I said. 'Exactly what she's been doing for the last three months,' Husband answered, 'sleep around.'
Three months later Husband returned to The Pink Cottage on his own. 'She's not here,' he said miserably on the phone. But several days later she stumbled up the driveway, wretched and scrawny in the soggiest Somerset winter in decades. Husband was ecstatic. For a month and a half he took care of her; worried about her when the wind howled, and watched anxiously as she clung to her tree-top boudoir through outrageous stormy nights.
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| Foul Weather En-Route |
On my first morning back at the Pink Cottage, Husband leapt out of bed at dawn. 'Where are you going?' He looked at me like I was an idiot. 'To open the work-shed for Penny,' he answered. The shed is huge. You could park four cars in it. He'd been housing the bird indoors during the torrential rains. I went out to see her. She stood staring at me. I heard a voice. What the....? I went closer. 'Well, as Wittgenstein said in Notes on Logic...' someone announced. Penny's pea-head cocked as though she were listening closely.
'The bird is listening to Radio Four,' I said to Husband back in the house. 'She prefers it to music,' he responded.
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| Shhhh... I'm Listening to The Archers |
Later, Penny showed up at the back door. 'Could you give her some cheddar cheese,' Husband asked. I obediently went to the refrigerator and retrieved a chunk to break up for her. 'Not that one,' he said, 'the mild cheddar! She doesn't like the mature.'
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| Friend and Beastly at the Shore, Happily Away from The Bird |
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| Mirror Mirror in the Hedge |
Husband kept careful care of the bird. Months passed, and
then it happened again. She began to wander off, just like she had at the
same time the previous year. We realized it wasn't because she had found
a better buffet elsewhere, but that it must have something to do with the
season and the thickening foliage in her roost of choice.
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| A Boy and his Peahen |
We watched her waddle off one day. 'I had the strangest dream,' Husband said, 'I dreamed that I was at a carnival with Penny. We were walking along like she was my pet dog or something. We came to a stand manned by a Bird-Whisperer. The Bird-Whisperer held out his hand. Penny went up to him and pecked out a message in his palm with her beak. The Bird-Whisperer turned to me. She wants me to tell you something, he said. She says, 'Tell him my name is Erica."'
'You dreamed that?' I said. Husband nodded. Penny disappeared down the street. Maybe, I thought, it's not such a bad thing she's going.
'She'll be back,' Husband smiled and went back into the house.
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Springtime |
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Bye |
