She was content.  This was what I had dreamed of.  And this is just as I found her.

Mama Red comes running!

I spotted her from my brother’s truck as we crested the hill. She lifted her head from eating.  She knew Jamie’s truck and started our way.  She began to run.

(I don’t have to tell you what I began to do.)

You all remember that, back in the summer, my brother, who took care of Mama Red and her three babies for me, told me that he could no longer take care of her.  A lack of rain over an extended period had dried up his pastures, and there was not sufficient food for them to eat.  I’d have to find them a new home.  Otherwise, he’d have to take them to the cattle sale, which is a nice way of saying “slaughter house.”

Melissa and Bren, the two mamas

I panicked.

Enter an answer to prayer.

Enter Melissa, a woman as kind as they come.  My brother tells me she loves animals so, she might let them stay in her house!

Melissa, in an email to me yesterday, told me she’d just come from giving “our” babies some sweet feed.  That thrilled my heart!

My brother delivered Mama Red and her year-and-a-half-old twins and two-and-a-half-year old steer to Melissa’s place about a month ago.  I got to visit them on Thanksgiving in my brother’s truck, cresting that hill and craning my neck to get my eyes on Mama Red and her babies.

Mama Red tells me, "I love it here."

I got out of the truck with a bag of her favorite, Sunbeam white bread.

“Mama Red,” I called out and made my way to her.

She ate all that I could give her.

And then I had to ask her the question.

I had to ask her, “Are you happy here?”

She raised her chin and told me, “I love it here.”

And then I gave her an update on that novel, ONE GOOD MAMA BONE, that I’m writing that honors her.  I told her, “In the Spring, Girl, in the Spring, I’m going to send it to that editor I’ve told you about.”

She sniffed my face and hair and then licked my cheek.  I knew she was thanking me for finding her and her babies a place to live.  And yes, ma’am, a place to live out all their days, too.

All of them.  Every last one.

I’ve just spent the last two hours writing a blog and got all the way to the end, when something happened that made me realize what I was really writing about.  And then I sat in silence and looked out my window and saw four glorious turkey hens walking through the leaves that have fallen in my yard.  They were coming from the feeder I have for them out back and making their way to the sanctuary out in the woods where I have their water and a mineral lick.

Now, to tell this story….

I’ve been away from my blog for a while — choosing, instead, to focus my time on writing my novel.  But today I was moved to reconnect with you good people, who share a love of animals, so I went looking for something to share.

I found it amidst my daily Google alerts on one of the subjects I follow, Cows.  The headline read ”Drums Woman Spends Day in the Life of a Cow” and then a brief summary followed, The contest offers winners in each of the association’s six regions a 24-hour stay on a working dairy farm, where they were “treated like a cow” – a reference to the pampered life led by modern dairy cows.

OK, did I really see the word “pampered” referring to the lives of modern dairy cows?

Surely, this is one of those tongue-in-cheek articles, I was thinking.  Surely, “pampered” couldn’t be used to describe dairy cows, whose babies are taken away from them almost immediately — the girls mostly used as replacement heifers for older mama cows, considered “used” or “empty” and sent off to slaughter after four, maybe five births, which the industry calls “lactation cycles.” But the fate of the boys can take two paths — either be a  “bob veal” and put in a veal crate for four to five months and then slaughtered or their lives can be extended to thirteen or fourteen months and then be slaughtered for beef. Plus, according to the nation’s largest farm animal rescue organization, Farm Sanctuary (http://www.farmsanctuary.org), three out of four diary cows in America never get to graze in a pasture.

This is the frame of reference I brought to the article.  I opened the link.  http://standardspeaker.com/news/drums-woman-spends-day-in-the-life-of-cow-1.1221139#axzz1c0JIIhSS There, on the left side, was a photo of the winner, a woman sporting a nice orange hat and standing with two men, while words on the right talked about her being one of six essay winners of a “V.I.P. Dairy Farm Experience,” which allowed “them to be ‘treated like a cow’ – a nod to the modern comforts cows enjoy on the farms of today.”

Hello, World.

But take a look at this photograph.  I found it on Facebook yesterday of a newborn calf, and I mean so newborn that he still is wet from birth. In his ear is a yellow tag, number 65.  This is for the auction process that soon will take place.  And you read above what his fate will be.

Pampered?

I think not.

Truth is….this gets me in my heart so much that I almost can’t stand to be in this world.

But here’s where that something that I was telling you about comes in.  I contacted the woman who posted this photo, a woman I did not know and asked her if I could share her photograph on my blog.  I noticed she had several photos of animals and that she and I shared a love for them.  She wrote back within minutes with these words, Grazie per il contatto. Puoi e devi utilizzare tutte le foto che vuoi. ciao a presto.  I found a translation online for her Italian and discovered she said this: Thanks for the contact. You can and you must use all the photos that you want. hello soon.

I saw where she lived in a place called Alpi.  It’s the Italian word for Alps.  I flew over them once, many years ago, and was stunned at their majesty.

This is when I looked out my window a while ago.  Love has no barriers, including language or geography. This community of people who care for animals and their well-being spans this globe. One person here. Two people there.  Earth-strong.  The fact that this woman in the Italian Alps connected today with a woman in Tennesee, both of us fighting in our own way to better the lives of beings that have no voice, except ours.

And yours.

So, if you want a V.I.P.dairy farm experience, folks, just take a look at Malfalda’s photo.  Number 65.

Mama Red and Baby Boy and Baby Girl

It started two long weeks ago with a phone call from my brother, Jamie, on whose farm in South Carolina Mama Red and her one-year-old twins (Baby Boy is beside her and Baby Girl on the ground) as well as her steer from two years ago live.  And when I say “live,” I mean these animals can ride out their days there until they die.  For Mama Red and Baby Girl, this means being able to stay alive vs. at around age 8 or so, being taken to slaughter where they make hamburger out of old mama cows.  For Baby Boy, though, this means being able to live past age two, when he would be considered at his prime for steaks and roasts, etc.

This is unheard of, this freedom to live out their days.  And I’m talking unheard of on a regular farm like my brother’s and not places that give sanctuary to these animals, such as the wonderful Farm Sanctuary http://www.farmsanctuary.org/ or the Gentle Barn http://www.gentlebarn.org/.

What I’m saying is my brother, bless him, lets me give sanctuary to Mama Red and her offspring.   Mama Red, as most of you know, is a character in the novel I am writing, One Good Mama Bone.

But back to the phone call.  Jamie told me that Baby Boy is not the “steer” we were thinking he was — he’s actually a “bull.”  As explanation here, steer means a neutered male, which means he has no testicles.  Jamie typically takes care of this soon after the males are born and does this by putting rubber bands around their testicles, which makes them eventually fall off.  Jamie thinks he may have overlooked doing this for Baby Boy.  So what, you might ask.  Baby Boy could try to breed his own sister and even his own mother.  Not good.  One solution we talked about was separating him and putting him in with the regular bull, if the other bull would let him.  Another solution was to hire a vet and castrate him now.  I hated the thought of putting him through either, but I was prepared to, given the alternative of selling him.  Which is No Ma’am.  No Sir.  Not ever.

Baby Boy minutes after being born June 2010

But that wasn’t the real trouble.  The real trouble is my brother’s farm is in a severe drought.  Jamie last week called to tell me that what we decide to do with Baby Boy could be moot, if the pasture doesn’t get rain.  And soon. It’s hard for me to even write these words, but he means that he’ll be forced to sell the animals, including mine, since the pasture now is close to dirt.

I called my father to talk to him about alternatives.  He said to me, “Brenda, we’re running a cattle business here.  This is what you do when you have to do.”

“I don’t have to do,” I told him.  No Sir.

It’s been a week now, and there’s been no rain.  The forecast today calls for a 20% chance with a high of 98 and a low of 74.  You could ditto that for tomorrow.  After that, the chance of rain falls to nothing until you hit the weekend, and then it’s back up to 20%.

Jamie says he may not be able to wait that long.

I told him Let’s find hay from somewhere and ship it in.  I’ll pay for it, regardless of what it costs.

We’re looking.

And praying.

Won’t you join us?

Mercy, I wish this writer could come up with a better word, one that is not a cliche or considered trite, but the word that continues to come to my head to describe what I felt being in these good folks’ midst is special.  It has to do with how encouraging they are to and of each other, their talk of mentors, calling them by name and thanking them and not being afraid to show their souls when they served on a panel discussion about their mentors or finding home.  Home, yes, that’s it.  That place where we feel welcomed and encouraged.  A place of warmth.  A place where egos are checked at the door. 

Not all writers are this way.  I had an experience at the world premiere of a play a few years back.  I was in the restroom during intermission, and little did I know the almighty writer on whose novel the play was based was washing her hands beside me.  I said to her, “I’m really enjoying the play.”  She told me, “Don’t talk to me right now.  I’m processing.”  She dried her hands. I kept mine wet.  I could not move.

In 1990, I lived in Atlanta because a corporate job took me there.  Two years into it, I walked to my condo for lunch one day and saw on my coffee table, the first chapter of a novel I’d begun.  This happened on a day when my corporate job was particularly boring.  No, better than that — meaningless. I went back to work that afternoon and picked up a yellow legal pad and on it, wrote my obituary.  I wrote “Brenda McClain, manager of Media Relations for BellSouth, died today in her home in Atlanta.”  I said to myself No ma’am.  If I died right now, I could not rest in peace. I skipped a space and wrote HOW WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR OBIT WRITTEN?  Immediately, I wrote “Brenda McClain, writer, died today in her home in…..”  I knew I wanted to die a writer, but I didn’t know where.

Within five minutes, I wrote my resignation and set about giving myself the life I wanted, one where I gave the better part of me to my fiction, while I was fortunate enough to do some consulting/training on the side.  I stayed in Atlanta five more years before I decided where I wanted to live.  I entertained two places — 1) Somewhere in North Carolina because of the serious writing community that I had experienced with the North Carolina Writers Network (http://www.ncwriters.org/) and The Writers Workshop in Asheville (http://www.twwoa.org/) and 2) Edisto Island, SC because of the remoteness.  I chose Edisto.

But sitting there last weekend among those good people in Asheville, I let myself wonder how my life would have been different if I’d have chosen to make a home in North Carolina, instead.  For a bit, I let myself imagine that I would be living as a published writer with at one whole novel out there vs. a life of a writer who — yes, has won some awards — The 2004 SC Fiction Fellow and the SC 2003 and 2007 Fiction Project — but has two novels in the proverbial drawer with a third — and a promising third at that — about to be born.

But I didn’t stay with that for long.  Because that’s not the road I took.  And, because I believe that our lives play out exactly right, I welcomed exactly the decision I made, which delivered me to the place I am.  Poet Ann Deagon, the weekend’s honoree, likes to sing some of her words when she reads aloud.  During one particular poem, she paused to get herself in tune.  And then she said, “If I don’t start in the right place, who knows where I’ll end up?”

As much as I would have loved to have experienced all these years with this amazing North Carolina fellowship, I believe I started in the right place.

Still, though, it felt good to be among them again.  They showed me what was possible and reminded me that should I ever have the occasion to wash my hands during a stage adaptation of my novel and someone compliments the play, I want to believe that I will graciously nod my head and thank them ever so much.   And then I will smile and think of North Carolina and those people and their hearts.

The uproar began with a piece called “Five Reasons to Buy From Your Local 4-H.”   http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2011/06/21/55-five-reasons-to-buy-from-your-local-4-h/

So many people left responses that a second piece, “Does 4-H Desensitize Kids to Killing?” was published two days later. http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2011/06/23/does-4-h-desensitize-kids-to-killing/?hpt=hp_c2 As that article pointed out, two incredibly distinctive lines of thinking emerged: “One was that 4-H promotes responsible animal husbandry and the cultivation of food resources in a responsible, ethical way and the other was that it serves to desensitize children to the suffering of animals.”

This is the question my novel, ONE GOOD MAMA BONE, addresses.  I grew up on a farm in South Carolina but did not participate in 4-H myself, so I’ve had to do tons of research, including visiting various county fairs that included the 4-H Market Show.  Always I’d find kids, who were showing, and I’d ask them about the experience.

One was six years old.  Before he took his steer out into the show ring, I asked him what he was going to do after the show that night.  I was thinking he would say he’d go up on the midway and ride some rides or eat some cotton candy.  But that’s not what he said.  He took his eyes away from me and put them on his steer he was touching with both hands, and then looked back at me, his eyes now filled with tears.  He said, “I’m going to kill it.”  That comment right there, that one, did it for me.  It captures everything.

My father, 1941's Grand Champion winner, and me

I come by this story honestly. My father claimed the very first Grand Champion title in my hometown of Anderson, SC for his 1000 pound steer in 1941.

He was 14 years old and brought home more than $300 that March day, he tells me.  He got his picture with the steer and the grocery man who bought him on the front page of the local newspaper and above the fold at that.  Even a local restaurant gave him a free lunch that day. He was something of a celebrity.

When I’ve asked him about it, though, what he’s always told me was this: “You don’t think about it.  You just get your mind on something else.”

The novel I am writing presents the two views.  And I must tell you that my job, as the writer, is not to provide an answer — but only to pose the question.   Your answer is your business.  What I must do is tell a story and one where neither “side” is correct but both emerge fully human.

That’s what I’m interested in — people coming to their own truth.

Stories can do that.  Good ones can.

Mama Red and twins say "hi"

I got to visit with Mama Red and her twins last week and wanted to send along the latest pic.   Her twin girl is standing beside her and twin boy is laying on the ground.  Notice the markings on the girl’s face.  Like mama, like daughter!

Look at how curious they were.  I got right up on them, and they let me!

I must tell you that what you’re looking at is totally out of the ordinary, though.  In fact, you may never see another picture like this in a long time — maybe even never.  Do you know why?

What makes this so unusual is that mama and calves are still together.  Because by this time in almost 100% of calves’ lives (they are 11 months old now), they would not be standing by their mother.   They would be some place else.  They would have been weaned from her at about six to eight months old.  That means taken from her, separated.  Sometimes only on the other side of the fence.  But sometimes a little further away, a pasture or two.  Or even sold and taken miles away to other farms, where the girls would be bred at about two years old or the boys taken to feedlots, where they’d be “grown out,” “fed,” and then slaughtered for their meat and cowhide when they reached around the two year mark.

This will not happen to Mama Red’s twins.  They are living out their lives on my father’s farm in South Carolina.  They don’t have to be of use to man.  They can just be. I’ve told them this.  I believe they understand.

Mama Red and baby boy twin

I like to look at their baby pictures.  Mama Red here is with her baby boy.  This is just minutes after the boy and girl were born on June 25th of last year.  Notice her baby girl is not in the picture.  You know why?

Mama Red walked away from the baby girl.

I’ve talked with lots of farmers about this phenomenon where mothers choose one and leave the other.  Most said it’s the old “survival of the fittest” thinking.  Some say they choose the stronger.  Some say it’s always the boy.  One even told me that they’re not choosing — the mother actually “hides” one and goes with the other, but will return for the seemingly abandoned one.

This intrigues me.  In fact, I’m including it in the novel I am writing, One Good Mama Bone. The reason?  It serves the story I am trying to tell.

My brother, Jamie, did not let Mama Red walk away, though.  Yes, he interfered.  He gathered up the three of them and put them in a lot near the barn and forced Mama Red to take care of both babies.  Of course, he supplied her with extra hay and all kinds of goodies to keep her strong.   She went along quite nicely with this and proved all over again to be the exceptional mother that she is.

Mama, don't you want me?

Here is the baby girl just moments after she was born last June.

Who could resist this baby?

I love her markings.  She has her mother imprinted on her.

When she gets another year on her, I’ll likely breed her.

And guess what?  She’ll get to keep her baby, too.

I’m talking that one and every other one she’ll ever have — every one — all of them allowed to live out their sweet lives for no other reason than to just be.

Welcome to this world, baby girl and baby boy……

Snake!

I would give Gladys Kravitz on the old TV show “Bewitched” a run for her money.  I am forever looking out the windows in my house.  Hey, remember…that’s how I spotted the one and only Billy O last September.

So there I go, walking by a window and, true to form, look out, but this time there is no adorable goat with his head cocked at me.  No ma’am, this time, I see this long black SNAKE, not more than a yard from the brick.

I screamed.  Yep, I sure did.

And, yep, I started thinking about killing it. 

I have a gun, a .22 rifle my father helped me buy when I moved here to this land.  Said I might need it for protection.  I needed it now for protection. I went to get it.

Let me put this in perspective — Here I am, a most ardent animal lover, and I am thinking about killing an animal.  Yes, I admit this.  My father always said the only good snake is a dead snake.  My father, when I was a little girl, would take me snake hunting with him down at the creek about this time of year when snakes like to slither down the trunks of trees towards the water.  He would hold me with his left arm and, with his right, he’d shoot them.  He was a marksman in the Army.  A sharp shooter.  One time a snake chased us across the pasture, and he had me in his arms and we were running, and he turned and fired at the snake with his pistol like a cowboy and killed it.

Maybe this last one didn’t happen.  Maybe I was thinking in my little girl memory that my father was actually my hero, Roy Rogers, and this was something Roy Rogers could do.  Or maybe did do.  The lines have blurred.

But the snake out my window wasn’t chasing me.  He appeared to be catching a few rays, actually.  I could see he wasn’t poisonous by the shape of his head.  I was thinking he’s some kind of black snake, maybe a racer.   One that would run away, if I encouraged it.

I shouted out the window Go on now, all right?

He lifted his head like a periscope and looked at me, his tongue flickering.  His body did not move.

I mean it now.  Go on! And my hand that wasn’t holding the gun motioned for him to head on towards the gravel road out there.  Take it and go be with his kind.

But the snake did not move.

I went out on the front porch and said the same, I said Go on now!

He did not.

I stomped my feet on the porch floor.  Don’t snakes feel vibrations?

Nothing.

I raised the .22 and took aim.  My father taught me to take aim.

When I moved here, I stood outside in an open space at dusk one early evening and pledged to live here in harmony.  I said those words out loud.  And I thought I meant them.  You are a hypocrite, I told myself. I was about to take a life that may have been here on this land before I ever stepped foot on it.  I didn’t see him taking aim at me.  I was ashamed.

I lowered my gun.

In time, he slithered on.  Towards the gravel road.

I called my father and told him about the incident.  Did you blow its head off, he wanted to know.

No sir, I said.  I let it live.

Mama Red, beautiful Mama Red

On rare days, if I’m lucky, I catch a glimpse of the divine.

I caught such a glimpse one November morning on my father’s farm, in light so early it still could be considered dark.  I caught it in a gathering of mama cows, a dozen of them, all huddled and straining against the corner of an old barbed wire fence, each with her chin shoved high into the air and sending forth sounds.  They were guttural.  They made me shiver.

Above their mouths, a mist hovered.

I had been in bed asleep in my father’s house of brick when their sounds woke me and drew me forth into his pasture.  I stood some ten feet away from them in my pajamas and boots.  The air was chilled, but I wasn’t cold.

Mostly I could see their eyes, these mamas, their lids pulled back as if with rope and showing a vast sea of white surrounding circles of brown.  One mama had her eyes cut towards me.  She stood the closest to the corner, and as she bellowed, she looked my way.  This was the cow who would become Mama Red.

I'm ready for my close up now.

I would not see it yet, but she and the others had pushed forward with such force that the end post angled out as if it was an arm waving at something familiar.

And it was.  Their babies.   They were some thirty yards away, at the other end of a grassy lane that had lost its color in the first frost.  Like their mothers, they stood huddled at the corner of a barbed wire fence.  They, too, sent forth sounds.  Deep ones.  Long ones.

I would come to know they were steers, neutered males, aged six to eight months.  My father, the afternoon before, had separated them from their mothers.  It’s called weaning.  It’s what farmers do.  Otherwise, the mothers would continue to let their babies nurse, and that is not good, they tell me, since likely these mothers were carrying again.  Carrying another baby inside them.  This is the process.  As is what would happen later that morning when the sun came up full and strong.  A trailer hitched to a truck would pull into my father’s driveway and come around the back of his house, past the corral where the steers stood, to the chute on the back of the barn, where the steers would be herded and loaded into the trailer and then taken to the cattle barn to sell to other farmers, who would feed them and fatten them for the only thing many believe steers are good for, slaughter.

The sounds that morning were deafening.

A flock of geese flew into the air from my father’s pond, set into the earth down the hill.   They flew past the mamas and towards the babies, but then stopped short and made a sharp turn and flew away from us all, as if not wanting to flaunt their freedom.

Mama Red’s eyes stayed on me, and I knew in my bones what she wanted.  She wanted me to get her baby back.  To knock down her fence and his, so he could once again place his mouth around her teat and draw forth all that she would freely give.

My eyes flooded.

She let out another sound that joined in the chorus around her.  And I fixed on the mist just released from their mouths, and I imagined it floating my way, to my face, which I would hold chin up in the hopes that the mist, surely holy, would come find me.  And save me.  Like a baptism.  Like what my Sarah, the protagonist in my novel, has been needing from the moment I created her.  Needing to find the salvation she has spent her whole life seeking.

I bow my head in reverence to Mama Red

I told Mama Red and the others that day, and I said it out loud, I said I can’t get your babies back, but I can write a book that honors the way you love them.

The trailer came.  The steers left.  The mamas continued to stand at the corner and call for them, even though no sounds came back their way.  This would continue for a couple of days, and then the cows, one by one, would leave the fence and go back out in the pasture, where they would fill their bellies to feed out the new babies inside of them.  Occasionally, they would look back towards the corral and bellow.

Mama Red would be among them.  And like her, those that had claimed the fence line, would have dried blood scattered up and down their necks and chests, where the barbs from the wire had penetrated their hair and skin as they had sought freedom.

I would have a dream some days later that the grassy lane was a channel of water.  And in that water were cows, mama cows, moving past me, their heads working hard to stay high.  I was standing in the pasture where they had stood.  I was standing on holy ground.  Except I was behind no fence.  It no longer was there.  When they passed my way, they kept their eyes cut towards me, and all over again, I made them my promise.  To show the world this piece of divine that I had encountered on a November morning on my father’s land, one that will teach my Sarah what the cows already know in their bones – that children do matter, maybe even the most.

Farm Sanctuary's Gene Baur in Nashville

Big words from the leader of the nation’s biggest farm animal sanctuary yesterday in Nashville.  Gene Baur of Farm Sanctuary told an audience of some 50 people packed inside a vegan restaurant, “There’s a shift underway…We’re in the midst of a food revolution right now.”

Meat consumption, he says, is down and has been since 2008, forcing the meat industry to look for international markets.  This, despite numbers that are staggering.  Ten billion farm animals are killed each year for us to eat.  Ninety percent of that number comes from chickens.

Gene, who has been vegan since 1985, brought an urgent plea at The Wild Cow restaurant for us to make our food choices “align with our values.”  This is the message he is spreading across the nation as the organization he began and now leads is celebrating 25 years of working to protect farm animals from cruelty, inspire change in the way society views and treats farm animals as well as promoting compassionate vegan living.  Farm Sanctuary (www.farmsanctuary.org), with farms in both upstate New York and California, boasts a membership of 220,000. That number blows my mind.  Close to a quarter of a million people support the efforts to make bring compassion to farm animals.  Sound the trumpets!

Gene was in Nashville to speak at a conference on pigs.  Ironic, he admitted, but then said that this shows the shift in thinking these days.  The fact that conference organizers wanted to include a farm animal advocate speaks volumes for how far we’ve come.

All of you who know me know that this is music to my ears.  I had the good fortune to spend some time with him and tell  him about the novel I am writing that celebrates the maternal connection between mother cows and their young.  What an honor for me to share with this man, who has devoted his life to what I love so much.  It was a moment I’ll never forget.  A true gift, indeed.

Of course, he already has accomplished much with that big heart of his, but he shared with us his ultimate dream, and I thought I’d leave you with it.  “To let nature just be,” he said.  A time when animals are not killed for our food and they are not afraid that they will be.

If you’ll allow your mind to go there, do.  I did.  And I don’t want to come back.

Four beautiful eggs in carolina wren nest

I know they say your house is blessed if a bird builds a nest in the eaves.  Wonder what it means if the nest is built in MY CAR?

I am so happy to say that, for the second year in a row, a carolina wren mama has chosen to lay her eggs and nurture her babies in a nest in the covered wheel that sits on the back of my Pathfinder.

Look closely now, Folks, and you’ll see four white eggs in the middle of that nest.  See them?  They’re about the size of those chocolate footballs we like to eat at Easter and have reddish speckles on them. 

A little schooling for you…..the male carolina wren actually builds several nests for the female to choose the one she wants.  Builds them on spec, you could say.  So, of all the nests he built, this mama has chosen the tucked away safety of my car. I am thrilled.  And so honored.

A story about last year.  So, she chose my car, laid eight eggs, and I kept watch as much as I could the days that followed.  I wanted to see the babies learn to fly.  One morning in May, I looked out and there was a baby taking flight in the front yard.  Oh my!  The mama was fluttering around the young one, along with another adult carolina wren I believed to be the daddy.

I remember being prayful for this gift I was given.

Soon, another little bird came flying out and landed on the dirt not too far from the back of the car.  And there came mama and daddy flying over the little one, urging him or her on, I imagine.

Wait!  Coming across the yard at a speed I never knew they could move, a box turtle came charging in the direction of the baby bird.  Mama and daddy went wild with their squawking, diving over the turtle, who continued the charge.  I was out there in a flash and doing something I’ve never done before — picked up the turtle, telling him or her, “I think not!” as the head receded into the shell.

Now what? I thought.

Ahhhh…..yes.  I took him around to the back porch where I had a big pot.  I placed him inside, along with a small cup of water and some sprigs of grass. “You are in time out,” I told him.

He remained there (in the shade) until I saw no more babies flying from the car.  And no mama and daddy nose diving. Then I took him from the box and restored him to his place in the yard.

“We live in peace around here,” I told him.