And sometimes you are lucky enough to get Another Yesterday for another story.
Such is as it was with me.
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Yesterday.
Yesterday was a fine day. But this yesterday was a Saturday yesterday.
We woke early, as we do most days, but what sets Saturdays apart from our other days is Saturdays we meet our friend Margaret for breakfast at the Golden Corral.
But in the morning’s, before I do anything else, I put a cup of water in the microwave. Two and half minutes later, I’ll set Mike’s green tea to steeping. Another cup of water goes in the microwave for my first cup of instant coffee. (Stop yucking me. I love it.) Then I take our two little Yorkies out for a morning pee.
The sunrise was especially colorful this morning.
“How’s that go?” Mike asked. “Sailors delight?”
“Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky in the morn, sailors be warned,” I recited.
I didn’t know that this is actually in the Bible. Although it’s not attributed to sailors in the Bible, it is in Matthew 16:1-3. See what you learn from reading the Bible!
My coffee water is a good temperature when I come back in from walking the dogs and I spoon a scant teaspoon of coffee in and give it a good stir. I don’t like it strong but what it lacks in strength I make up for in volume. I drink coffee all day long with my final cup being just after supper. Then it’s no caffeine tea for me after that if I have anything else.
Instant coffee gets a little skim of foam on top after stirring and I sip it off as I make my way to the computer desk. I set my coffee on the side table, not too close to the computer, not trusting myself to not spill it.
I slide into my seat. Open the lid of my laptop. Wiggle the mouse to wake up the computer. Hook up to the internet and navigate to Yahoo and my email account.
Every morning I type out a quick love letter to my sister, a habit I got into after the death of our sweet girl some six months ago now.
On this fine Saturday morning I had bacon on my mind. I don’t buy bacon anymore. We eat it once a week at our Saturday breakfast and that’s often enough for us.
Bacon! I wrote. And I thought of the dog treat commercial where the dog comes tearing down the stairs and through the house for a Beggin’ Strip and he’s thinking, Bacon! Bacon-bacon-bacon! So I wrote Bacon! a few more times.
Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Bacon!
We are going for breakfast
Love you a bushel and a peck!
Okay, maybe my bacon got away from me.
“What’s the deal with a bushel and a peck?” you ask.
A Bushel and a Peck was a popular song in the 50’s and Doris Day recorded a version of it. It was even in a movie. But I didn’t know any of that because the very first time I heard it was when my beautiful daughter-in-law Kandyce sang it to Andrew, just a newborn babe at the time.
“What is that song you’re singing?” I asked.
“A Bushel and a Peck. My mom used to sing it to us when we were little.” And since then I’ve asked her to sing it for me a couple of more times. Kandyce has a beautiful voice and I love to hear her sing.
I think about things sometimes.
I think about loving you guys.
I think about writing you stories and how it makes you feel connected and loved. I hope it makes you feel connected and loved!
I think about the little love notes that I write to my sister. It makes her feel loved. And I know it makes me feel loved when she always takes the time to reply to them. Especially knowing how busy she is.
I make a daily phone call to my mother. Sometimes we talk for a long time, sometimes we only exchange an “I love you.” And there are others too who are dear to my heart but what I was thinking was this.
Isn’t it funny how we all need different things to make us feel loved?
Okay, so I start my days pretty much the same way. Only on Saturdays, as I go about my morning routine, I watch the clock and make sure I’m ready to go by seven-fifteen. Golden Corral is only five minutes up the road and they don’t open until seven-thirty but Mike likes to be standing there when they unlock the doors.
After seeing the same faces Saturday after Saturday after Saturday you start to talk and you even become friends.
Chuck and Doris are just such a couple. They have been married over fifty years.
“I’ve been taking my bride to breakfast every Saturday mornin’ for the past fifteen years,” Chuck told us, still obviously in love with his wife.
And you miss them when they are not there. “Where were you! We missed you last week!”
“We had to go see a friend in North Carolina who’s dying of cancer. It’s probably the last time we’ll get to see him.”
And now Chuck and Doris tell us when they won’t be there for breakfast and of course, we do the same for them.
We enjoy our Saturday breakfasts with Margaret and all our Golden Corral friends and I know that our little dogs know when Saturday rolls around too because I always save them a little somethin’-somethin’ from my plate. A few scrambled eggs and a little chicken.
“Chicken?”
Our Golden Corral makes the best fried chicken and it’s on the breakfast buffet. I’ll eat the crispy’s and just bring some of the meat home for the girls. Once in a while Margaret will have a little too much bacon and rather than throw it away I’ll bring it home for them but bacon is full of nitrates and not really good for them. Mostly I try to stick to the things that aren’t too bad for them.
Itsy and Ginger have come to expect this Saturday morning treat and can be pretty insistent if they think I’m not getting my coat off fast enough. And sometimes I make them wait a little longer until I put another cup of water in the microwave too.
I give the girls their treat and even Macchiato, our tabby cat, shares in the booty. I make my coffee and head back to the computer to see if Phyllis has answered my morning love yet.
Yep. There it is. I open it up.
I like bacon a lot, she writes. But maybe not as much as you do.
And I laughed and laughed. She really tickles me.
I planed on spending the rest of the day writing so I thought I’d take the girls out for a walk first. It was cold but walking warms me and I head for the campground below the dam. I’m going to look for eagles again today.
I hadn’t gone far when I see a flag flapping from a dried brown weed. Is that a feather? And I stop to take a picture. If it is a feather the wind has pretty much shredded it. More likely it’s fluff from some plant or another.
On we go and I can hear the insistent yammering of a nuthatch long before I see him.
Sometimes I think the critters want me to take their pictures.
Around Baby Blue’s corner and we head into the campground.
When I wrote Yesterday I Googled eagles and found out that it is NOT legal to possess one of their feathers.
No matter. It didn’t stop me from uttering my little prayer.
Lord, it’s just man’s law that says I can’t have an eagle feather, not Yours. I’d really like to have one.
Now, let me just say that I know God commands us to obey man’s laws too, so long as they do not conflict with His, but we are not talking about a speed limit here, we’re talking about a feather.
“A law is a law,” you say.
True. But... and there’s always a but... speed limit signs are to keep us all safe. Not possessing an eagle feather keeps the eagles safe. People would kill eagles for the feathers. I would never do that.
“Peg, that sounds like justification to me,” you say.
It is, but I truly didn’t believe I was doing anything wrong.
Past the pond and into the campground we go.
There’s the deer remnant.
See, I told you there wasn’t much left. Ginger thinks she has to go smell it but I hold her back. I don’t want her to pick up any bugs or diseases.
“Peg, you didn’t have to show us that!” you admonish.
“Whatever!” I say. I know. It’s not nice to say whatever, it’s dismissive. But if you hate that, you’re really going to hate what’s coming up.
A lot of times we leave the roadway and walk along the edge of the woods. And that is what I decided to do on this day. We’re walking along the edge of the woods and as we get near the dam I see the high water mark from our recent flooding. The first thing I notice is all the trash and beer bottles! The second thing is all the dead fish. Oh my goodness! They were all over the place! If they come in with the water, why don’t they go back out with the water? I wondered. Then I come upon an ancient species of fish called a paddlefish or spoonbill.
Aww. He’s broken.
These fish can get big, commonly five feet long and sixty pounds but this one was only a couple of feet long, not counting his bill.
You would think there would be birds all over the place eating this smorgasbord that the flood served up, but there wasn’t. I guess there was too much of it.
I keep walking and I spot a driver’s license.
I pick it up, wipe the dirt from it and look at the picture. A girl. Then I look at her name. Margaret Katherine. I’m Margaret and my daughter was Kathryn. Spelled different. I look at the date of birth. August 25, 1981. My Kathryn’s birth date, just a year later. I see the license is expired. Five years ago. I wonder how it came to be there among the debris where I found it. I tuck it in my pocket. I’ll see if I can find her on Facebook and ask if she wants it back.
A little further on and I see ice! It was hanging from everything! It was mesmerizing.
A hundred and forty-five photos later we move on.
Birds catch my attention. There’s three or four of them flitting from one branch to another. Then this one stops.
It’s a bluebird!
I hardly ever get lucky enough to capture one of these beauties and he posed for me for so long that I moved on before he did.
“Thank you,” I tell him as I go.
I know.
I’m silly.
A plastic grocery bag, stuck in a tree, the water freezing as it dripped out a hole in the bottom.
To me, this is more disgusting than a dead animal. At least the dead animal will be food for another critter or bugs or in the very least will go back into the soil to nourish the earth.
A plastic bag?
A plastic bag can take anywhere from twenty to a thousand years to decompose. But the most disquieting thing about a plastic bag is that they can become serial killers.
Now I am at the place where I normally see the eagles and there are no eagles here. There are fishing boats on the river today and I am guessing that they are keeping the eagles away. I decide to walk deeper into the campground. My neighbor told me that he has seen as many as twenty-five eagles at the other end of the camp ground.
Twenty-five!
My route to the back takes me along the flood line and I see a second paddlefish! This one twice the size of the first one.
Then I see one of these things laying there. How does that happen? How do you lose your bra?
“I can think of one way, Peg!” you say.
Yeah, well, how do you just go off and leave it. Those things are expensive!
On we go and I come to some old trees with their roots exposed. If I ever knew there was a hole through the middle of this one, I’d forgotten.
We keep going and I’m almost to the end of the campground and as far as you can go until you hit water and that’s when I see it.
Look!
Is that…
Is that…
Is that the mottled feather of a juvenile eagle?
Truly, I do not know if it is an eagle feather or not, but I am going to chose to believe it is.
And I smile at my God. I asked for an eagle feather and I got an eagle feather. Now I’m thinking I should have been a little more specific in my prayer request. Although I envisioned the feather of an adult, I only asked for the feather of an eagle.
Thank you Father.
I look around to see if there are any more feathers. That’s not being greedy, it’s being thorough. I don’t find any but I did find something I never thought I’d see.
“What’s that?” you ask.
And that is a fish in a tree.
I didn’t see twenty-five eagles but I got a feather!
The girls and I head back out and I see a tree eating what looks like a light fixture.
You either shrink back from the challenges in life and become scarred and deformed or you absorb them and go on to be strong.
Our walk continues and a splash of yellow catches my eye.
Look at that, would ya!
Even in the mist of the destruction and debris left by the floodwaters, a lone dandelion struggles to hold on.
And you can eat those things too!
We get back out to where I normally do my eagle watching and I see a juvenile on a branch tearing at something he grasped between his talons and the branch.
His head came up and I see a piece of flesh as he tosses his head back and gulps it down. We are at the dam; I assume it’s a fish. I picked Ginger up so she wouldn’t run ahead and spook him and he sat there on the branch and ate a few more bites. He watched me but didn’t take off. I get around to the front and he isn’t all that concerned about me as he uses a branch to clean his beak. At least I think that’s what a bird is doing when they scrape their beaks back and forth across a branch.
When I get all the pictures of him I think I want I turn my attention to another tree and there sat six eagles, four of them juveniles.
I get a few photos of them but not being close enough to get anything really nice, I turn to go and what do I see! Three more eagles sitting in a tree!
Gosh, what a day! I saw more eagles at one time then I’ve ever seen before!
Feeling very pleased I head for home when another eagle comes in for a landing and lands on a branch almost over my head!
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Sunday I sit in front of my computer, my coffee close by and I write my love to my sister.
I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you!
Extrapolating from yesterdays response…
You love me too but maybe not as much as I love you? I wrote.
Nope! I love you more! She writes me back. And I smile.
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And so my Another Yesterday went and is gone a week ago now.
I have been asking Momma to proof my letters and stories for me before I send them out and after reading this one my mother had a little talk with me about the definition of illegal and who is exempt.
“It doesn’t matter if you intend no harm Peggy! It is illegal!”
And you know what?
She’s right.
I went back to the internet and learned that if you find an eagle feather you are to leave it alone or contact the conservation department. They will most likely have you send the feather to them.
Okay. So be it.
I did it, I owned it.
I sent the feather picture to the Missouri Department of Conservation for identification and have been waiting all week to hear from them.
“The ornithologist believes this to be a body feather from a gull,” Kristie from the MDC let me know just yesterday.
No more wishing or praying for an eagle feather for this girl!
Lesson learned.
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