Lost Geese — or Parents?
Birdsong wakes me, but it’s the geese that keep me from going back to bed. I pull the shades up to see the sun winking off tiny ripples in the lake across the street, irresistible to someone living in a city where ice reigns six to seven months of the year. The birds tell me summer is coming, but the geese make me laugh, especially when they pair off into couples and jabber at each other while propelling their impossibly heavy bodies skyward.
I imagine they are my parents, dead but reincarnated as the Canada geese so prevalent around here. They are trying desperately to find me. As a child, I was embarrassed by how often my parents got lost, even when driving to our cousins for Thanksgiving (which they did, year after year, for decades.)
I imagine my father-goose saying, with barely concealed frustration, “Faye. It’s across that way, that house with the red roof. We just took a wrong turn!”
“Max,” my mother-goose answers. “It’s right here, with the cracked driveway and evergreens! That other house is too big. She couldn’t afford it!”
On they honk, and I know it won’t work to wave at them or call out. Instead, I listen to the honking, trying to forget that I was laid off from my job in January and haven’t been able to find anything close to it since.
I can’t help wondering, this morning. Do geese have a sense of direction?
They must, which would be a first for my parents. They seemed to lose their direction whenever we left town, as soon as we passed a ten or fifteen-mile radius surrounding our home. They always got directions and wrote them down diligently, but that never seemed to prevent them from getting lost.
If we were actually making progress towards a relative or friend’s house, we got stuck in traffic. On Thanksgiving or Passover, I dreaded our time on the Long Island Expressway, which is the gateway to Hell, though no one is going to tell you that. But why else would the acronym for this highway be LIE?
Between the traffic and missed turns, I grew up with zero confidence as a driver.
Unfortunately, I am sorry to tell you I get lost too often on the way to friends’ homes, job interviews, what have you. On the other hand, I have become an excellent walker and enjoy the feeling of surefootedness on hikes, trails, and my daily walk around the lake (weather permitting). I should say halfway around the lake because I usually turn around after a mile so I can start writing earlier in the day.
The outdoors has become more precious since the pandemic when walks were the only way most of us had of killing anxiety. The habit stayed with me, as I’m sure it has with the many others I see around here.
While walking, I pass lilacs (my favorite blooming flower), sage, and of course the water that changes color depending on what the sky looks like. If the sky is blue, the water’s blue; if the sky is grey or cloudy, the water is too. In the evenings, I can hear Loons, haunting the shoreline with calls that sound like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
Today, I hear a duck before I see it; long, urgent quacking makes me look up to see why it wants attention. Circling above it is a huge bald eagle, waiting for the right moment to seize the duck’s babies, or at least one of them. I watch the eagle circling, wondering what I can possibly do to stop this from happening. At that moment, three or four crew boats cross the area, and the eagle withdraws into a tree.
I watch for a moment, knowing the eagle will reappear again after the boats are gone.
The eagle will reappear, but my job won’t. I have somehow been magically thinking I could find something better in a month or two, which almost never happens to anyone. I watch the water lapping at the lakeshore as people stroll, stop, or run by. My husband and I have always been a two-income family, and while the news stories keep saying unemployment is low, I don’t know if that’s true for a lot of professions, including writing.
I wish I could talk with friends about this in a concrete way, but most everyone I know doesn’t want to talk about money. What I’m looking for, mostly, isn’t hard; just someone to tell me whether my budget sounds workable. But no one will tell me that, let alone what their own budgets are like, and what would happen if they too, lost their positions.
I look up to see a couple putting kayaks into the water, feeling something squishy underneath my feet.
That means geese are sure to be nearby, Max and Faye, maybe, arguing again about how to find me and whether they should move on to another town. I want to talk to them, ask if they too, ever worried about money, since my father created his own store and business. I’d love to show them our house and the nature area behind it, full of deer, foxes, coyotes, ducks, egrets, and other animals. But there are so many geese around here, I have no idea which would be the right ones.
The lake can’t tell me, either. Instead, it tells me what it knows as a lake: not to give up, not to think of anything else but the present moment. It tells me tomorrow is the first day of summer, which is also the day I’m giving an author talk for my book, Crooked Lines.
And though I will have to drive there (and briefly get lost due to endless construction in this city), I will arrive on time. I will be able to do a microphone check. No geese will interrupt the event. No parents will, either, and of course, I know that mine have not turned into geese and aren’t searching for me.
If they were, though, I would tell them not to worry. I’m a little lost, but not so much that I can’t find my way. I know that because — after walking around this lake for a while — I’m getting closer to figuring out my own strengths (and challenges). And that’s going to take me where I need and want to go.
