We woke up this morning to no power. Apparently gusty winds accompanying a cold front had knocked a tree onto a line somewhere. The sound of "something falling" we'd been puzzled by during the night had been the circuit breaker downstairs.

Since we don't have a laptop, lack of power means we're out of business. At least there was coffee left over in the percolator to be heated on the gas stove. I thought about the people along the Gulf Coast who will be out of business for longer than a morning.

You'd never know it for all the vainglorious weapon rattling and greed mongering that we squander most of the world's resources on, but human beings are still at the mercy of the elements. Not to mention disease and all the other infirmities of the flesh, the need for shelter, food. There are plenty of problems for us to deal with rather than spending all our energies fighting each other in one way or another.

When I took my coffee cup over to the sink I caught a glimpse of something through the back window. Something large, moving in the backyard. A dozen or more wild turkeys. Surprisingly big, remarkably ugly, vulture-like. They were scratching and pecking at the dry grass like some breed of chicken from hell.

I'd never seen them in the yard before. The yard was sunk in deep gloom because of the rain clouds. For all I know the turkeys might congregate in the yard, in the darkness just before dawn every day. After a few minutes one of them lurched off into the woods. Another followed, right behind. They filed out, one by one, into the weeds edging the pines.

After awhile the refrigerator hummed to life. I reset the circuit breaker that had tripped and put the computers on. Time to get to work. Or blog.