Tuesday, June 16, 2009

17 Geese and a Duck


Sorry. The duck took off somewhere while I was finding the camera and getting coffee and just generally not being fast enough, even for the geese who were hanging around eating bugs and goo off the rocks. This could be a whole other set of geese, given how long it took me.

Geese love goo. I love geese. I understand perfectly that if they came and stood on the lawn and made goose doo all over the grass, or if I played golf and experienced "The Goose: Bane of the Golf Course," then I, too, would curse and revile geese like the rest of the civilized world. But they don't do that here. They float majestically by with their fuzzy babies and eat rock goo and squabble amongst themselves. In the spring, they spread their wings and do the mating dancing of geese which is akin to behavior in bars, which I have mostly observed on television. Only geese are more graceful and much less self-conscious.

Once in the night, the first summer we were here, a goose was searching for another goose, or maybe for a lost fuzzy gosling. And it cried so painfully, so anxiously and so long. I could hear it moving up and down the shoreline in the dark. Searching and keening. It was a sound to tear the soul. So, I forgive the geese for being obnoxious in the real world.

Truth is, almost anything afloat upon or flying over glassy blue water is beautiful. Geese. Ducks. Boats. Freighters, for sure. Even ordinary motor boats with their interesting paint jobs and cool names. It's even hard to hate a cormorant, diving. Or thousands of them, flying in undulating lines of black script on the horizon. "Fly, you nasty cormorants, fly!" we say. "You look just fine from here."

Not dead fish though. It's hard to warm up to a dead fish. Especially if there are several. Or several hundred. And soap bubbles aren't great. But a big log, that is really an escaped tall tree, can take your breath away. Partly by how big a hole it would make in your house if it could find its way over the rocks. Which you kind of believe it could.

Today, though, seventeen geese and a duck with an iridescent emerald head. Worth getting up for.

June 16, 2009




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