I have long believed that the reason Christmas decorations are so gawdy, the reason they tend to be oversized, the reason some folks are so eager to festoon their homes and selves is an effort to counter the drabness, the colorlessness, the quiet of the year nearly gone. December is not without its own unique beauty, but few of us are able to be still enough to find it.
I am determined, though, on this mild and slightly overcast afternoon to do just that – to close my wreathed front door behind me and go searching.
I stop at Daddy’s mailbox to retrieve the crop magazines and John Deere catalog and flyers for gutters that still come all these months later. I avoid looking at the empty rocking chairs on the front porch. I avoid looking at the shelter where the tractor and combine are no longer parked. I avoid looking at Owen who is looking at me, waiting for instructions.
As I wrestle with the idea of abandoning the long walk I had planned, my eyes are drawn to a huge flock of geese – 57, if my count is correct – approaching from the east and aiming for the pond behind my house. They look like kindergarteners in the lunch line, clumsily maneuvering themselves into a slightly sloppy V, a series of black checkmarks moving in an invisible current across the flat gray sky. So effortlessly they defy the gravity that keeps me planted on this dusty road.
Every year the geese come, flying in on the cusp of winter, setting themselves down gently on the pond just outside my back door. In a few days I can expect to see feathers littering the edges of the fields, evidence not just of their presence, but also of their aliveness, their fragility.
They always make me think of my friend David who would grow practically apoplectic when he heard someone refer to “Canadian goose.” “It’s CANADA!” he would mutter under his breath. “CANADA goose!” And, yet, in his endearing contrariness, he referred to the group that overran the pond in his neighborhood as “the Canadian Air Force.” I can not help smiling at the memory.
I have, for many years, referred to the birds in my thoughts as “MY geese.” The ones who have interrupted my reverie today are not, of course, the same ones that I first admired many years ago, but I do believe that they are the progeny, the descendants of that first handful that caught my attention with their squawking. I need to believe that they come back, that they return so regularly because they, too, feel an attachment to this place.
In Celtic spirituality, it is a goose – specifically a “wild goose” –, rather than the peaceful dove, that represents the Holy Spirit, revealing a nature that is noisy, courageous, and passionate, one that can not be controlled or tamed. One that is audacious and shameless and, dare I admit, as gawdy and oversized as an inflated Santa.
Watching my wild geese move silently across the sky, I wonder if what we are really doing when we drape the windows with plastic garland and populate our lawns with motorized Nativity scenes is trying to capture, if only temporarily, that audaciousness, that passion. And I wonder what keeps us from doing it the rest of the year.
The geese disappear behind the trees that ring the pond. I do not hear the splash of a hundred webbed feet hitting the water, but I can imagine the ripples catching the last of the daylight and splitting it into a million tiny shards like the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree welcoming me home.
Copyright 2024
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