Well, THAT'S Not a Goose

Yesterday evening I had just finished closing up the shop and was heading out the door when I heard a deafening squawk from out in the yard. Those effing Canada geese, I thought. Damn nuisances, as my good friend Katie would say. I closed the door to the glaze room and quickly scanned the yard for the intruder. There was another squawk, louder this time, and more discernible. I looked up and found this:

Oh yes. That would indeed be a peacock. I had looked skyward to see this iridescent pheasant just chillin' in the branches of an evergreen tree and all I could think to say was, "Whoa."
     I ran up the steps to my apartment, grabbed my camera, and went out onto my balcony to take pictures. I heard a door close and looked across the driveway where Syd had also come out onto her balcony.
     "Maybe it's some kind of vulture?" she shouted.
     "If that's a vulture," I shouted back, "that's one incredibly flamboyant vulture." I took a few more pictures and then something occurred to me. "I didn't even know peacocks could fly!" I yelled. Idiot. Everyone probably knew that except me.
    "Neither did I!" God bless that woman.

Syd has neighbors down the road who are in the process of starting a farm. A couple weeks ago their dog showed up at the shop and Syd had to call them to pick her up. Last week I was in the packing room and looked out the window to see a goat moseying down the driveway. Three minutes later I heard Syd upstairs (the packing room is in her basement) pick up the phone and say, "Hi, it's Syd. Um...I have your goat." Along the driveway the neighbors have built a chicken coop populated entirely by hens with a thirst for freedom and a no-guts-no-glory philosophy on life. I'll be on runs and see them darting across the driveway or hunched in the shade of a shrub just outside their their enclosure, admiring their own escapes. On top of all that, yesterday Syd told me that she had been on her way into town when she encountered several sheep in the driveway near the road and wound up herding them back through the gap in the fence by driving behind them at two miles per hour. In case it's not abundantly clear, these neighbors, though I'm sure they're delightful people, are fairly incompetent farmers. This is all to say that when Syd and I saw the peacock in the tree with the voice box turned up to eleven, we looked at each other on our respective balconies and one thought went through us.
     "Do your neighbors have peacocks?" I asked.
     "Let me make a phone call!" she called back.
     The whole time we'd been outside the peacock had been squawking and craning its neck as if trying to decode a line of hieroglyphics carved into the tree trunk. All of a sudden we heard another squawk coming from the other side of Syd's house. We headed to the top of the driveway where, through the fence and the trees, we saw this:

The male and female were engaged in the world's most obnoxious game of Marco Polo.
     "We need to call the Peacock Hotline!" Syd laughed.
     I nodded. "The one time in the history of the universe that anyone will ever need that service."
     At this point we had learned that the peacock did not, in fact, belong to the neighbors, but that the neighbor was on his way over because he didn't believe that there was a peacock in the tree.
     "So how do we...what exactly do we...do?" I asked.
     Syd shrugged. "Maybe they'll shut up if we go inside."
     Because we had nothing else to try, we headed for the indoors. I was almost to the base of my stairs and Syd had just closed the kitchen door behind her when the second peacock burst out of the trees, flapped its enormous wings once, twice, and glided gracefully to a branch near its mate.
     I watched them for several minutes, hoping to catch a heartfelt reunion, but these two birds were boring. There they remained on their separate branches while I changed my clothes, and there they remained when I left for my run. When I returned, the second peacock had disappeared. By the time I got out of the shower the first one had vanished too.
     Maybe Syd had called the Peacock Hotline after all.