Morning Walks and peacock feathers

What do you do on a summer vacation or weekend morning?

No school or office, so what  is the need to wake up early. The charm of sleeping on a cozy bed for longer hours is too good perhaps to find out if anything else could possibly be happening in the morning. What could be more important?

I think me and my siblings were doing something certainly more important. We were busy making beautiful memories of the morning time that we spent together. Summer mornings or even weekend mornings were great time to wake up actually extra early like 5:30am and go for a morning walk mostly with our mother. We would all just go to walk from our house to several different places nearby in the campus. A favourite place was a 'forest' close to the school. Though it was full of trees it was perfectly possible to navigate around. So one of the favorite activities and charm in the morning was to navigate in that forest and look for peacock feathers. 

I had the opportunity to see a peacock in Pilani with my family on a fine summer morning walk!

Oh yes, there were peacocks and peahens and we totally coexisted with them.They would be in our gardens, dancing in our garden and all the courtship would follow that dance. They would dare to come closer when we offered food. They would not be even tad bit bothered about destroying our flower beds on a routine basis and we would run after them, if we saw them. They would not fly very easily but managed to get on some lower branches of tree and shout and call each other "Peyoooo, peeyooo..". They would do all of that but seldom leave their feathers, we had such a hard luck finding their feathers.

So the walks, that's where we would find feathers. Not sure, if people who don't live with peacocks know this but peacocks shed feathers in fall just like trees. So summer vaccation and then fall till winter set in we would go for walks in the morning and look for feathers, find feathers and compete as to who got more. Over a period of time we had a lot of feathers. Waking up early for morning walks was a wonderful feeilng by itself to be one with the nature and then added to that the charm of collecting peacock feathers so very rewarding.

What we did with those feathers eventually? When we had collected enough our mother made a peacock on a cloth canvas that decorated our living room for years. A peacock in our own living room with the feathers we contributed from a morning walk! Morning walks, peacock feathers, art and memories sewn together in a common thread!