Disappearing Acts

Richard and I returned home Sunday from a weekend trip to find Canadian goose feathers – both adult and gosling – strewn along the side of our pond, showing obvious signs of a struggle. Our search turned up no further sign of the geese as it had last year after a predator attack - a full goose wing near the pond, the last vestige of a father having defended his mate and offspring to the death and through his sacrifice creating a diversion for them to get away to safety. I wondered if there’d been any survivors of this year’s attack. The pond seemed so sad and lifeless without them, a few of their feathers floating on the water’s surface near the shore. I felt a little bit guilty because during the last leg of our journey home I’d been manifesting an empty pond in the future, a pond devoid of geese and their prodigious amounts of feces. But I hadn’t intended it to happen so soon or so violently. I just wanted them to move on eventually.

“Well, you got your wish,” Richard said. Had he been reading my mind?

‘I feel bad too,” I said. And I did feel glum about the whole thing.

“You got your wish,” Richard repeated and walked back toward the house, hopscotching around the newly memorialized piles of goose poop. Now it would be their monument.

Richard and I have had heated debates over the geese and their excrement. Lately, though, these have turned into civilized discussions. We both agree on the waste removal aspect of the discussion; we only diverge when the topic turns to whether or not we should allow Canadian geese to roost on our pond in the future. I am for discouraging them and Richard is for letting nature be nature.

“Who are we to come here and buy a house and expect all nature to change around us?” Richard said. He can get very impassioned about it.

‘ALL nature?’ I think to myself … loudly.

“The animals were here before us, we should adapt ourselves to them.”

This discussion had been in the car earlier and we, well I, had suggested tabling it until October when we had experienced the third year with them around. Now their vanishing had made the issue moot.

I kept conjecturing about the animal that had scoped them out, lain in wait. Had it been a fox or fisher cat? Maybe an owl? No, not an owl. Why hadn’t there been any sign of blood? No bones, no carcass.

“They get them by the neck and then drag them into the woods,” Richard said, right out of an old Dragnet episode.
“You got your wish.”

I began thinking of Ginger and Mary Ann and how they were taking the disappearance of their new found friends. It had been odd and wonderful lately watching the 8 of them warm to one another. The Canadian parents would hiss a bit if our geese would get a little too close to their kids, but other than that there had been tolerance, curiosity, and an easy kind of cohabitation. I’d see all 8 go swimming off together in our pond, our girls slightly separated from the family, giving them their space while chomping at the bit to be included as full members of the team. Had Ginger and Mary Ann heard the struggle when the predator pounced? Had their been any sound? Could they sense something was wrong? Were they scared? Would they miss them?

Last week one night I had come home late when it had been my responsibility to lock up all the birds that night. I raced from my last appointment miles away, but by the time I pulled into our driveway it was dark. I quickly checked both coops and found all the hens and chickens perched and safe, but Ginger and Mary Ann were nowhere to be seen. I went into a mild panic, murmuring “oh, no; oh, no; oh no” over and over again. I checked everywhere I could think, I called their names, nothing. Finally, I had the sense to pause, stop still, breathe, let some other options in and I thought “the pond.” I went over there with the flashlight and yelled out their names. After the second or third time I heard their high cheeps way off in the distance, coming ever closer. They’d gone out onto the pond naturally, for safety. And hearing my voice they immediately came, waddling joyfully up the pond’s bank, their wings spread like kids playing airplane, their feet making those hilarious flatfooted flip-flop sound on the ground. I was so happy to see them. I made them an extra warm hay bed to sleep on and some good feed and water. If something had happened to them I don’t know what I would’ve done.

The feathers on the ground. I couldn’t get the sight of those feathers on the ground out of my mind. They were like the chalk outline of a body at a murder scene in a film noir detective movie. They were gone. The Canadian Geese were gone. (Humphrey Bogart voice: “And I’m not talkin’ south for the winter, sweetheart”) And I’d wanted them gone, sure, I admit it, but that was next year, not now. I was willing to put up with them for this year. But now it was too late, literally and figuratively. It was midnight as these thoughts kept bouncing around in my head and both Richard and I were wiped from an 8 hour drive, lying back in bed, fading fast.

‘Sweet dreams,’ I said.

“You got your wish.”

The next day Richard and I did an Isagenix cleanse which is just this side of fasting. I get punchy on cleanse days, especially by midday. Everything begins taking a surreal turn. So when I looked out the window and saw the Canadian Goose family lounging by the side of the pond, all 6 of them, alive, unhurt, looking as if nothing had happened, I thought I was seeing a hallucination. I alerted Richard and both of us had to step outside and stand in our front lawn and just let the whole turn of events sink in. When I explained the phenomenon to our neighbor Royce he said that he had seen the feathers too and thought the same thing had happened that we had thought. But then he thought that they must have molted.

‘But that many feathers? And all those different sizes of feathers?’

Royce smiled and shrugged. What more was there to say? There they were.

Lots of disappearing acts go on up here. Some literal – like Lucy, our orange cat that rode cross country with us from LA disappeared less than a month after we got here never to be seen again. Some are symbolic (to me) - like the old stone walls hidden in the woods now, covered with moss and leaves and fallen trees, still in the same location where once they were out in the open serving as the divider of cleared farmland. Other disappearing acts are not so evident. For instance, I’m sure aspects of the me that arrived here three years ago have disappeared, aspects that maybe had outlived their usefulness and needed to disappear – showing obvious signs of a struggle - to be replaced by who knows what. We shall see.

There are days I can feel like I’m disappearing. Lots of things are disappearing all around us. It’s in the air, you can feel it, like a predator coming. Ways of life, ways of doing things. I choose to see it as molting. I just looked up the definition of “molt” and this is what I got:

“Molt (verb transitive/intransitive) – to shed feathers, hair, or skin periodically, especially seasonally, to allow replacement of what is lost with new growth.”

I like that. I like molting. I only hope I can do it as gracefully as a Canadian Goose.