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Tunnel vision or just not paying attention

For days I’ve been thinking the hens hit menopause early. Oh well; there are other chickens in the world. Then I looked about four feet to the left and saw the payload, seven yummy eggs. The brain is a very strange thing. Sometimes it is so slow to react, like the time I got into my car early in the morning one St. Patrick’s Day for a 12-hour drive to Key West and my eyes alighted on the cigarette lighter. It was on the floor. Then I noticed the glove box. It was open. Next I saw a tiny piece of glass on the driver’s side floor. After that I saw a bunch more glass. Finally I looked up and realized the little triangular window that no longer exists on modern cars — wing vents or breeze windows — was smashed to smithereens. I had been broken into. Hard to take it all in at once, I guess. I need these eggs, too, for a trade — two baguettes for six eggs. Bingo.

How'd I miss them?

Buffalo (not sheetrock) in McIntosh County

“What are they like?” I asked the woman at the Georgia Buffalo Ranch on Highway 17 in McIntosh County as we scooted through the electric wire that, she assured me, was not activated. I still look for sheetrock when driving down Hwy. 17, thanks to Melissa Faye Greene and her incredible book about a people and a county, “Praying for Sheetrock.” But now there are buffalo, a couple miles south of the Smallest Church in America.

“Aggressive,” Sherry DiSimone said without hesitation. “They’re aggressive.”

That’s when I changed my mind and handed her the bag of treats I just bought for $2. Something about their long, thin grey tongue (“just like a giraffe’s tongue,” she said). And their long wooly coat, which looks like dreadlocks. A little scary. Each one of those suckers weighs in the range of 1,850 pounds. They are broad in the shoulder with giant humps, square faces and bulging eyes. There are 40 buffalo at the Ranch, including eight bulls. We were feeding bull No. 5, but Get Her Done was lumbering up from the back of the pack.

The good news is the country’s buffalo population is up to 600,000 from an 1847 low of 800. The bad news is the cost of a skull: they start at $130.

Two little wires between them and us