It’s a messy, dreary day. In fact it’s the third day of cold windy rain. Confirmation of how awful the day was came when a young graduate student arrived to church with not one, but two umbrellas. One was broken and couldn’t be easily folded. It took him several minutes of wresting with the spines before he could fold it enough to put in the trash. We joked about submitting it to the art department to see if he might be given a scholarship. I pointed out that his sculpture needed a name which he quickly christened “Northwest Wind”.

I continued to sit in the church entrance watching people blow in the door, thinking I would have preferred to stay home, curled up under my electric throw. In the midst of my misery, I remembered that in spite of the gray day, the sun had broken through for a short time and shown down on me in front of my computer. For there on my screen, with Google at my beck and call, I found that wonder of wonders, I was right and my vocabulary genius offspring was WRONG! Yes, my PBS Watching, National Geographic Reading, Spelling Champ, and walking Thesaurus, was, how shall I put this, at loss for the correct word.

I’m referring to a silly conversation we had earlier in the week, which began with the size of turkey to purchase for Thanksgiving. In the midst of chatting about how much may be left over we started talking about the thingy that hangs from a turkey’s neck. When she didn’t know what the thingy was called I ventured to suggest the term was a wattle, which she promptly pronounced she was sure that it wasn’t. But gobble, gobble, it is a wattle!

Now before you jump to the conclusion of a mother reveling in being right, like a turkey with his feathers fanned, let me share with you how the sunshine faded away. As I sat there feeling quite triumphant, the cartoon picture of a turkey caught my eye. At first I was looking at the wattle when my eye was drawn to his fat turkey legs and I remembered seeing a picture of myself once that made me think someone had photo shopped a turkey leg to my thigh. And now that I have reached a certain age, my neck is starting to resemble a wattle. Lord have mercy, at least my neck isn’t bright red! My moment of triumph came to a screeching stop. However those brief moments of basking in the sun were a wonderful reminder that there is always something to smile about!