Our Canadian friends are back

They've been back for  a while.  They arrived in the spring and then disappeared -- either going further north or to a local site for family raising. Now they're back in hungry numbers. This morning thirteen arrived while I was having breakfast, looking like an air force squadron but landing gracefully without need for a runway.  Mostly they stalk along the lawn grazing and looking, I assume, for bugs as well as succulent greenery. Now and then when I have a stale heel of bread, I tear it into pieces and throw it out for them -- although I wish the cute little squirrel would come by in time to get some. 

They usually stay two or three hours in the morning and then go away for a siesta, probably near or on one of the many little ponds, and then return in the afternoon for dinner.  I like to walk across the lawn to where my car is parked instead of taking the slightly longer route on the sidewalk.  But I have to keep my eyes on the ground because it's well scattered with their droppings. Joe, the handyman told me yesterday morning that he had swept up all the droppings on the sidewalk and in the parking lot  but he knew it was a futile effort. I thought it remarkable that he went to the trouble of sweeping at all.  He chases them when he's got the riding mower out. They may get vexed enough to leave for a while but they always come back. I like looking at them but their piles are an annoyance.  Such is most of life, a mixture of good and bad.

Homing Geese

Mary Oliver, my favorite nature poet writes about the return of the Canadian geese:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I am waiting for our lawn full of geese to come home. Two have sporadically appeared but maybe they have settled somewhere semi-wild to raise a family. I don't know. This is such a day as Oliver describes, some sun and "clear pebbles of rain" -- a new way for me to look at the world in which I live, one of the wonderful gifts of a poet.

Uninvited guests

The Canadian geese are back. They were here well into the snowy season and then disappeared -- presumably to more southerly foraging grounds. Then they came back for only a month or so early in the spring. And disappeared again. -- North, even to Canada? I don't know. The crows took over the morning wake up duties, we seem to have feuding congregations of them -- congregations do, of course feud fiercely sometimes. The crows certainly strut about like righteous parsons in their clerical feathers. They had stayed all winter, in fact, but must have been proselytizing because their numbers grew. Some mornings they seemed to be preaching about hell fire and damnation, usually from tree tops but sometimes from the lawn or parking lot.

The last few weeks the geese have returned, at first just a few and just for a couple of hours in the morning. Then more and more, they look, but do not sound like Quakers in their gray garb. Now their 5:15a.m.honking tells me the clock radio will soon come on. They have breakfast on the lawn by this side of the apartment complex. Nobody likes their leavings in the grass. Joe, the handyman sympathizes. This morning I had just had breakfast and was checking my email when I heard a motor -- Joe, on the little green John Deere, was herding geese off the lawn, riding like a determined cowboy -- I listened for a "get along, Little Goosies" but he played the strong silent type in a baseball cap instead of a stetson. I'll be curious if they are back tomorrow morning ... somehow, I think they will.