By Dennis Smith
My grandmother was a resilient, high-spirited widow who suffered no fools. She was also a walking encyclopedia of aphorisms, many of them, I suspect, inspired by the harsh realities of raising nine children on her own during the Great Depression. That she managed to maintain such an incredibly witty sense of humor remains a positive marvel to me.
No matter what misfortune befell her, she never got rattled. She either conquered it or got over it before she let it ruin her day. “Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed,” she told us. “Expect the unexpected, then embrace it. No matter your lot in life, build something on it.” We didn’t know what she was talking about half the time, but her endless supply of seemingly silly sayings would eventually become words to live by for me, my cousins, our children and our children’s children. I’m constantly reminded of her wisdom almost every time the boys and I take off on some kind of outdoor adventure.
Case in point: This past April, we camped on a prairie creek bottom determined to bag a tom turkey with our bows and arrows. We scouted the area two weeks before and located at least two large flocks and a couple of smaller ones. We not only found where they roosted, but where they strutted, fed and dusted their feathers during the day and the return path they took to the big cottonwood stands at dusk. We counted more than 50 turkeys in one flock alone. Careful not to disturb them, we crept out of the area and planned our hunt for the following weekend. We fully expected to pot one of those big ol’ gobblers, maybe even two of them when we returned. Turkey dinner was as good as in the oven.
Then the unthinkable happened: Four straight days of rain turned access roads into a network of evil, slimy goo slicker than a bowl of boiled okra and fit to swallow a Sherman tank. We had to cancel our hunt. When shotgun season opened the next weekend, out-of-state hunters swarmed into the area and scared our turkeys into the next county. Oh, we heard a few gobblers at sunrise, but none came to our decoys as expected, and we saw only a few random hens.
We were disappointed, but not for long. We flushed a covey of bobwhite quail on our way to our blinds each day, had a chance encounter with a prairie rattler, witnessed a big bull snake shedding his skin, watched a hair-raising fight between two boar raccoons and got some moody photos of a greater prairie chicken doing his crazy love dance on a fence post at dawn.
Gram’s words filtered into the conversation around the fire that night: “Expect the unexpected, then embrace it.” We almost forgot about the turkeys.