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 Dalai Mama Weekly BlogCatherine Newman chronicles life parenting Ben, 8, and Birdy, 5
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May 7, 2007
To Birdy at the Goose Pond
 Now you're scratching your legs — clawing at the backs of your knees, the sides of your ankles, even as the geese make their final approach to shore. You have a fever, which is why we're here, home alone, and not in Boston, eating hot spinach dip and deviled eggs with Daddy and Ben at a huge, joyful family party. We tried to pretend you were well enough to go until the thermometer insisted on speaking the truth about our day. But this itchy, feverish walk to the goose pond is the bonus prize for staying home together. Everything amazes you. "Look at the trees," I say, and you say "I see! I see them!" even before I can point out the little buds. You are too little to be surprised year after year by the fact that spring arrives here as a haze of red almost-leaves, and not as the buzz of electric pale green that I always picture. That will come in a month or so. Right now it's all mud and faintly red trees and geese honking by in delirious formations and a sharp lip of ice lingering at the pond's edge — spring a strange echo of fall, as though the world is right where we left it before winter. "That's the mating pair," I announce expertly about the geese, like I'm suddenly John Audubon here at the pond, even though I don't know what I'm talking about. "I know!" you cry, and leap again from the bench to scratch your legs, to make gentle beckoning sounds to the geese, as if they're cats, your arms spread wide, your gentle tongue clicking in your mouth. If I were a goose, I would come to you. And they do — but possibly less because of your good nature and more because of the heel of bread you are shredding into meticulous bits, tossing carefully and far so that the birds will be required to come no closer than they dare. Your cheeks are flushed the alarming pink of petunias. Scratch scratch scratch. I love being here with you, but I am the kind of person who worries about the fever. Who worries about the peculiar scratching, the touching of the muddy sole of your shoe and putting a hand to your mouth. "Don't," I say, and hold your hand in my own. I don't like that there's a cigarette butt here on the mucky ground, dog turds and a Snickers wrapper, that we're feeding the geese from a supermarket loaf when we should be out in a meadow with a pair of unobtrusive binoculars. I don't like that I am a person who cannot always enjoy the world's riches without noticing the tarnish here and there. Glass half full, for sure, all full even, but with a speck of something — a fruit fly? a bit of mold? — floating at its surface. But you, you are different from me, my darling. "That's a mama and a daddy goose," you say to me, as the geese tip their beaks up to the air, swallow the bread that ripples down their long glossy necks in a way that calls to mind mice and snakes. In a month, a fuzzy row of goslings will trail them like honking dandelions. In a month they will be parents again. "Don't be shy of us," you croon to them. "We would never hurt a goose." And when one suddenly bends his beak down flat towards the ground, narrows his bird eyes and hisses, you turn your glorious littleness towards me and cry, "I think he's just saying hello!" You say, "What a friendly goose!" But you run, laughing and terrified and feverish, into my lucky arms.   
Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir,
Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide. Post a comment
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