Author Archives: bonniedonily

About Accidents

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Photo by Matt Hudson on Unsplash

A recent Instagram post about taking personal responsibility after life deals you a crappy hand reminded me of something I read a few years ago in a book about achieving Your Personal Potential: you can prevent pretty much any bad thing that happens to you. You got struck by lightning? What were you doing out in that storm wielding a key tied to a kite, Mr. Franklin? You got passed over for a promotion? Well, at least you kept up your social media accounts – albeit during work hours (oops). You almost peed your pants on the 2-hour trip from Vermilion to Edmonton? Maybe you shouldn’t have had that extra cup of coffee before you left home or you should have stopped in half-way Vegreville. Mmmhmm?

You see where I’m going with this? Poop happens (again, another kind of accident), but mostly it’s preventable if we just take the time to Play the Movie in our heads of What Could Happen Next. Or as my husband likes to say: “Be a Boy(Girl/Person) Scout!”

I am reminded every time I go in my garden shed to retrieve my pail and my dandelion digger of The Time I Got Locked In the Garden Shed. Even though this is a different shed, the memory – and what I learned – still reverberates. The shed door had a vertical bolt lock, the kind that’s often installed horizontally. You pulled it up and opened the door but sometimes the bolt part stayed in the pulled-up state. On more than one occasion, on a windy day, I witnessed the door slam shut and the bolt fall into place. But on all those times, I was outside the shed.

Until I wasn’t. One day, I went into the shed to quickly pick up my pail when the door quickly shut behind me. This is where I argue The Case For Carrying Your Cell Phone With You At All Times. I phoned whomever was in the house and was subsequently rescued, with only the minute-est amount of snickering or consideration of leaving me in the shed for awhile (Because: Boys) – mostly because all those people in the house knew who was making them supper that night and for most nights after that. But in the 45 seconds between the phone call and the rescue I frantically made a survival plan of sleeping wrapped up in a tarp with a bag of lawn seed for a pillow, that is until I had eaten all the grass seed, the only organic edible that was in the shed. And I also berated myself for not propping open the door to prevent such an accident. [I also commanded myself NOT TO THINK ABOUT THE SPIDERS.]

Since I didn’t prevent “the accident”, I needed to do the optimistic thing and Look For The Lesson. I am now highly suspicious of all garden sheds, which is why you will see me painstakingly prop open the door of my now-tiny little shed with two or three of the tires that reside within. And why I store some Clif bars and an old sleeping bag in there as well. (JK. But a Person Scout probably would give me a merit badge if I did do that.)

But then, sometimes there are such things as Happy Accidents. There was another scene involving this same shed when I was on the other side of the yard, perhaps even in the same summer that I got locked inside. The rule was that whoever cut the grass was supposed to take the rolling garbage can full of grass clippings and empty it into the green bin on our block, no matter how many times you had to do it and no matter how tired you were after cutting our half-acre of grass. But on this particular occasion, one of the grass-cutters in the family had failed to do that and had wheeled the bucket full of grass into the shed and left it there. For a few days. Or maybe a week.

Until Tim and Simon opened the door to get a basketball to shoot some hoops. And after getting accosted with the smell of rotting grass, they were then overwhelmed by hundreds of little white butterflies streaming out of the shed, out of that bin of smelly grass. The three of us witnessed a real-life Planet Earth moment, but no cameras were rolling because we never expected such a magical thing to happen. We stood there and watched as the butterflies slowly dispersed and drifted off into the sky like so many helium balloons, all looking to reach Their Own Personal Potential. But the cameras of our minds were rolling and we still talk about it some ten years later.

There are some accidents we certainly wish we could prevent, but then they (hopefully) teach us a valuable lesson to Be More Careful. And then there are some accidents we know yield some crazy Butterfly Effect that made us happy that we weren’t.

About 10,000 Steps

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Photo Credit: Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Sometime last year, I bought myself a Fitbit. My motivation was mostly to keep myself honest about how much movement I was engaging in each day, especially since most of my work has me sitting at my desk and not moving my feet except to readjust them on my foot cushion. I downloaded the Fitbit app to my iPhone and fiddled around with it a little, but I did not change the default suggestion to try and meet the goal of 10,000 steps each day.

Guess what I found out? It’s kinda hard to get 10,000 steps every single day. Unless you’re a waitress or dog walker or a construction worker or elementary school teacher. But for me, meeting this goal is a decision I need to make very consciously. Even one turn around my beloved pond racks up only about 1000 steps. Maybe I need to take smaller strides?

Walking is kind of non-negotiable, though, isn’t it? It’s something that nearly everyone can do, the low-tide mark of basic movement and fitness. My denturist husband sees a number of older patients and whenever he meets someone who is still strong and spry after all their years, he casually interviews them: How do you stay so healthy? What’s your secret? And inevitably they report back to him that they walk. They are literally a ambling advertisement for good health.

So what’s the magic of 10,000? That number roughly equals 4 miles and the daily equivalent of meeting that can help you lose weight or at least maintain the status quo (as long as you’re not walking to the Ice Cream and Beer Store). And it can help regulate your blood pressure and blood sugar. All really good things.

So, every day I need to walk at least 10,000 steps and a couple times of week I also need to add in some strength training – because, hello? we lose muscle mass every second over 50. But 10,000 steps at one shot – for me – takes somewhere around 60 to 90 minutes. I don’t always have that kind of time.

Or do I? The alternative is…what, exactly? To spend more time watching television or scrolling through Instagram or reading – all of which are tempting in their own insipid way. After all, a body at rest tends to stay that way – it’s a Newtonian Law. If I don’t make the conscious decision every day to move then I’m making the opposite to stay on my butt. It’s not like I have to chase little people like I did when I was a young mama – and when it was probably harder to try limit myself to only 10,000 steps a day.

Of course, much of my sitting time is Working Time. But taking a time out for a walk – even around the house for a couple minutes as my Fitbit reminds me at 10 minutes to every hour – can be so rejuvenating. Just like when I was a young mama and Rick had to get me Out of the House and Away from the Kids in order to refocus, a step outside the house can be transforming. In other words, a hour a day is a small investment in my future.

See ya later. I gotta go for a walk.

About Walking the Pond

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One of the hidden blessings of our move just a few blocks west in our town is how close we are to The Pond. While we have lived for the last 16 or so years on the edge of Vermilion Provincial Park and have enjoyed the trails immensely, the five minutes it takes to walk to The Pond from where we currently live has been a true serendipity. Even when Rick gets home from work tired, once we get out the door for our constitutional, we are never sorry when we get to The Pond.

We’ve always been Walkers but the lockdown last March definitely cemented that distinction. With everything closed, the great outdoors became our gymnasium. With extra people in the house, each one of us used the park as our personal retreat. For the sake of just exercise, walking anywhere will do, but I find that the spiritual and emotional benefits of beautiful scenery definitely amplify the physical.

Walking the pond in the fall and winter is quieter – although we do see a lot of action from the muskrats. AND THE CRAZY BEAVERS.

But in the spring, it’s like Nature cannot contain herself. The leaves erupt from the trees like a time-elapsed video. And the beavers get chased away, it seems, by the influx of ducks and blackbirds. And maybe people – because we’re not the only ones who appreciate the finer points of The Pond.

I missed the crocuses this year, but yesterday I saw my first buffalo bean at The Pond!

And there’s always a lot of unreasonably paranoid gopher citizens on patrol.

Last year, Rick and I witnessed the hilarious mating rituals of the Red-Winged Blackbirds as the males danced crazily along the path totally oblivious to us as we walked by. However, I learned that a little later in June, they’re not so oblivious anymore and I stay away from the pond for awhile to avoid the protective dive-bombing parents.

But the best part, in the early morning, is the orchestra of frogs and birds and critters. Sound on!

About Women Rowing North

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The whole premise of this blog when I started it two years ago(-ish) was that – even though I had crested the hill and had moved past the “50” milestone – I wanted to assert that I am not done yet. Though my tagline is that this is a chronicle of a journey through a century, I don’t really know when I got to the apex of my personal journey or if 50 is that magical number. If stats have anything to do with it, chances are it’s more like it happened in my forties. But if I follow in the footsteps of my 100+ grandmother and her father, then I’m at the top of that mountain right now.

All this preamble is to say: I think about aging a lot. Am I doing it well? Are my expectations of my body, my brain, my energy realistic? What can I do better? And to what do I need to say, “Fugget about it!” ?

It’s not like all of this messaging is coming from within, either. If I flip through any magazine targeting women or sit through the commercials on television, I find that I am regularly assaulted with admonitions to, “Look younger! Feel younger! BE YOUNGER!” My search through Instagram for #fabulousafterfifty and the like, relentlessly turns up accounts of women who focus on their looks, their clothes and – especially – their not-looking-fifty-ish. Sigh.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Body positivity is a good thing, but while the actually-younger-peoples have IG accounts that celebrate all sizes and shapes, I have yet to find an older woman who’s flaunting her rolls and her wrinkles. I’m sure they’re out there, it’s just harder to find. And why do I even care? At this point in my life, you would think that I had built up some sort of resilience to this emphasis on the preferred physical expression of a person. But, instead, years of being a girl, a woman, a human being have stockpiled a garbage dump of uncertainty, reticence and even surrender to the messaging. After all, I’m still coloring my hair and trying not to dress “older” than I am. And I still like to hear compliments on my looks or expressions of “You don’t look like you’re fifty(three)!” (Although, admittedly, I haven’t heard that for awhile.)

It’s into this milieu that Mary Pipher’s book Women Rowing North comes like a drink of fresh water. Pipher, a therapist and writer who previously made her mark with Reviving Ophelia, a book that helped the adults navigate the landscape of adolescent girls, has turned her attention to women in the last third of life. I fall in the first third of that third, but Women Rowing North, like her title suggests, reads like a traveler’s guidebook, letting you know what to expect and how to make the most of your journey. And unlike my searches on Instagram, Pipher includes the wide swathe of women who fall in this age bracket, addressing different socioeconomic and health realities for the women she case studies throughout. Although reviews on Goodreads suggest it may be a bit premature for the 50-something to “enjoy” this book, older women say that they wish they’d read it sooner. I suppose it’s the difference between knowing what to (maybe) expect and wishing you knew then what you know now.

What I love about Pipher is that she doesn’t see aging as a problem that needs to be solved, ignored or reversed with the usual admonitions of exercise, healthy food and a miracle wrinkle cream – although she doesn’t say that such balance isn’t important either. Mostly, Pipher – in the time-honored tradition of therapists – focuses on attitude, which she says in her introduction, “…isn’t everything, but it is almost everything.” Which means that it’s within all of our grasps to do better and for each of us to decide exactly what that “better” is.

About Having Babies

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[This throwback post is in honor of my niece Jaime who just added a third little boy to her brood in much the same timespan that Rick and I had our three little boys. There’s always someone around us having a baby – it never fails to call up all those memories of “the good old days”.]

Three little pirates circa 1999.

I don’t remember the exact moment that I signed up to be a parent, but I believe my endorsement was a reflex action after the stick turned blue. When Rick and I got married, we knew we wanted kids eventually. After all, my new husband had two years of schooling to complete first. Who knew that after four months of practicing “planned parenthood”, much to our surprise we were planning parenthood?  After three kids in four years and lots of curious people inquiring if we knew what was causing it, we were pretty happy to be parents. In a way, having children is like stepping onto a scary, exhilarating, stomach-upsetting roller coaster. Once you have one, you often ask your partner, “You wanna go again?”

For all the satisfaction of producing a cuddly, adorable, dependent little baby there is nothing that replicates the shock of being awakened night after night by the same hungry, wailing, dependent little baby. Things like a full night’s sleep (four hours in a row feels amazing), bathing, hot meals (after re-heating it twice in the microwave, you finally just wolf it down cold), spit-up free clothing and two free arms become a luxury, like a fairy tale beginning: “Once upon a time, a LONG time ago…”           

Well, we’ve made it through that stage of parenting and we’ve successfully weaned, potty-trained and surgically removed soothers from our three boys, but our training in selflessness is far from over. The same issues of sleeping, eating and crying just resurface with new challenges. The kids still wake us up at night with nightmares, sleepwalking or parching thirst. As if that isn’t enough, now they can get out of their own beds and crawl into ours. If it’s already been a pretty bad night and we’re particularly unconscious, we might not even notice. That is, until the next day when you wake up with a horrible kink in your neck because some child was sleeping horizontally in your bed with one foot stuck in your ear. Then just as you drop off in the afternoon to catch a few winks to make up for the bad night and the bad neck, some child (who is supposed to be playing quietly in his room) calls from the bathroom for your assistance with the toilet paper.

And do I really need to mention the pitfalls of trying to feed young children? Just when I think I’ve developed a safe repertoire of spaghetti, chicken nuggets and grilled cheese sandwiches, the oldest child announces that he no longer likes the very thing that used to be his favorite and his adoring younger brothers follow suit. My kids don’t even like potatoes unless the cholesterol and fat levels have been exponentially increased and they come in a red box with an “M” on it. Which isn’t to say that I don’t make them eat their requisite age-numbered spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. There’s just a lot of nose pinching and gagging that accompany the process. When people see my three boys and comment that our grocery bill will certainly skyrocket when they’re teenagers, I just think that I can’t wait to see them eat a full meal.

I do have to say that the crying issue has changed a great deal. I no longer cry as much as my kids do. The initial burdens of childcare had me weeping daily for lack of sleep and lack of resources for managing this parenting thing. After a few years of motherhood under my belt, I feel like I can pretty much tackle anything. The roller coaster hasn’t really changed, but maybe now I’m just getting used to it. In fact, I’m loving every minute of it.

About Electricity

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Marcus Wallis on Unsplash

A funny couple of things happened this last week. Well, not really funny-ha-ha, per se, but more like “we can laugh about this as soon as we figure out how to get around it” kind-of-funny. My husband Rick was leaving for work early one morning, pushed the button to open the garage door and nothing happened. The spring on the door had broken and that essentially locked him in the garage. It turns out that a spring is a terrific mechanical aid not just for electrically opening the door, but also manually. He called his handy younger brother to help – or fix if he could – and between the two of them they managed to get the door to open and free our vehicles into the driveway until we could get the door fixed.

And then yesterday, almost immediately after his alarm went off, the power in the house went AWOL. After a few extra minutes in bed, he got up and tried to figure out how to get enough light in the bathroom so that he could shower and get ready for his day. He did it mostly in the dark, which heightened our appreciation for bathrooms in our past that have had windows. He finished getting ready – without the usual Global News in the background – and headed to the garage when he realized that for the second time in a week, he was locked in again. However, with the new spring, it wasn’t too hard for me to help him open the door and release him – although we do question the door designer who failed to add grabber-handles on the inside.

Ah, electricity! How do we use thee? Let me count the ways! Lights, coffee, garage doors! And need I mention that very special friend of mine: the Internet. Oh sure, I could use some data on my phone if I really needed to. But I didn’t REALLY need to. Unless, of course, this pesky power outage persisted.

But it didn’t. Pretty much an hour later, at 7:15 when lots of people are just getting up, the hum and shine of my interior domicile resumed and I didn’t have to entertain the idea of breaking out the camp lantern later that night or running my laptop battery down to zero.

But what if the power didn’t come back on? My brain was rehearsing this thought for the few minutes before the electricity resumed. Remembering stories of ice storms that resulted in power-less days-on-end made me question how prepared we really are. Can we cook? Can we bathe? Can we internet? And if I take it further, thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s book Station Eleven, when the electricity leaves and never returns, how happy would I be then?

In some ways, this pandemic has made me think about things like this. What sort of things can I live without? And how do I make my peace with the things lost that I have no say about? No gatherings of family of any real size. No traditional celebrations. No concerts. No farmer’s markets – well, not ones that aren’t highly policed and sanitized. No eating out inside or outside a restaurant. And some of the time, no haircuts, no libraries, no school inside the actual schools.

But we endure, even if it’s not all how we like it to be. I’m thankful that it’s spring and that the warm weather allows for walks together or visiting outside. There’s still thankfully the internet and the ability to Zoom if we want to. And there’s the hope that if we fix what needs to be fixed and we work together, we can bust out of our garages and be free again someday soon.

About the Best Memories

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The other day on Instagram, Gretchen Rubin posted this quote of hers: “The things that go wrong often make the best memories.” I’ve read this in her books, I’ve heard her say it on her Happier podcast and it always makes me think of the Disney ride, Splash Mountain.

In 2010, our family took a trip to Florida. (It’s called travelling – remember?) Our destination was Orlando, or more specifically, ALL of the Disney theme parks and waterparks, enough to fill up more than a week’s worth of vacation. Even if there was plenty of new things to see and do, our favorite rides got our due attention and we fought the lineups to go on the best ones at least two or three times. And one of our all time favorites, both in California’s Disneyland and Florida’s Magic Kingdom, had to be Splash Mountain. Even if our Florida experience on it was…well, let’s just call it memorable.

Here’s the story I told in our travel blog back then:

Splash Mountain is a lovely log ride along a relatively serene Disney river punctuated with two or three waterfalls of varying heights and one exciting five-storey drop at the end. Since we rode this attraction before, we already knew when to expect the drops. We were also familiar with the announcement (in an appropriate Southern drawl) on the PA system: “Looks like Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox are causin’ some commotion upstream. Your ride through Splash Mountain will begin again shortly.” This was (supposedly) to allay any aggravation when the ride would stall for a bit. So when we heard the announcement on our last time up the river, we assumed we’d get moving again soon. We were wrong.

Me and my fellow Splash Mountaineers circa 2010.

After 30 minutes of being cramped into a damp, sweaty giant plastic log right next to a hysterical animatronic bear with a bee’s nest on his nose on a very short action-and-music loop, the “magic” was starting to wear off a little. Three out of five of us needed to use “the facilities” and Rick was ready to run interference with the crazy lady in the front log who was getting anarchistic. Trying to distract their little ones, two moms in another log started to sing the “Banana-nana-fo-fana” song OVER AND OVER again – essentially replacing the hysterical-bear-audio-loop which thankfully was turned off after much too long. Annnnnnd the newlywed couple behind us were acting like the honeymoon had definitely lost its bloom. It was no longer a Tunnel of Love, it you know what I mean.

Finally, after about forty-five minutes of expensive Disney time, some “cast members” appeared from the secret doorway that was no longer secret since all lights had come on at about the same time that the soundtrack was shut off. We were warned (in a sinister government-agent kind of voice) not to try exit the boats by ourselves. I was also advised to “put my camera away” but not before capturing some very revealing inner chamber pictures. We were escorted down the stairs and into the back lot, sworn to secrecy about this Disney underbelly and then plied with Fastpasses and ice cream coupons. Let’s just say, it’s all water under the log now.

Isn’t this magical?

As I said, we’ve ridden Splash Mountain a few times. But the only time I can really remember is this one. Retrospection is funny, in more ways than one.

What’s your best/worst memory?

About Poetry

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I’m not a poet.

Believe me, I know it.

I won’t even read it

Very much.

Exactly how did Shakespeare manage to write all those rhyming couplets? Or Emily Dickinson or Shel Silverstein or Dr. Suess? My one-minute feeble attempt at poetry is really about as good as it gets for me when it comes to busting rhymes. My admiration for those seasoned (and patient) poets goes up that much more.

Professional admiration is one thing. Reading and enjoying poetry is something completely different. Everyone knows that poetry is good for you like doing yoga or eating vegetables or wearing a toque in winter. But barely any slim volumes of poetry grace my bookshelf and none find their way to my bedside table to compete with my usual fiction picks. And yet, once in awhile, some random poetical lines will stop me short when I meet with them out in the wild like one of Mary Oliver’s geese.

During my first year university, I flipped open my Norton Anthology of English Literature and encountered the familiar “poem” Big Yellow Taxi by “author” Joni Mitchell. Ummm, hello? Mr. Norton? That’s a song. But noooo, I learned in class, actually, those are lyrics, which is a form of poetry. Adding music is what makes it a song. But the music in my head made the poem that much more palatable and understandable for me, adding that extra sensory experience. And poetry is supposed to be all about the senses, right?

I was reminded of this the other night while we were watching TV with the closed captioning on. The lyrics of an ambient song came up and I was struck at how much music plays a part in my being able to engage with the poetry. Suddenly, I felt deeply what the lyricist meant when The Faces sang, “I wish that I knew what I know now…” because I could hear it in the singer’s voice: there are some things you just can’t really understand until you’re older.

I’ve also discovered that I can enjoy entire novels in verse. When my online book club choice for the month was Elizabeth Acevedo’s YA novel The Poet X, I had my usual apprehension about reading poetry. My library solved that problem for me when only the audiobook version was available. Read by the author – without my botched Spanish pronunciations of her lovely dialectical additions – it was an immersive experience that would have lost something if told in prose.

Years ago at a writers’ conference I had a similar experience. At the closing banquet, I turned up my nose when I read that part of the entertainment would be someone performing Cowboy Poetry. How quickly I was schooled by the masterful recitation by an old gentleman cowboy telling his story by heart, in verse, with the mesmerizing lilt of an ambling horse. If I had read it for myself, I would not have done it justice.

In her book The Cloister Walk, poet-author Kathleen Norris advises against dissecting a poem in order to try and understand it, as if the parts are more important than the whole or “as if the purpose of poetry is to provide boring exercises for English class”: simile, metaphor, image. Maybe I need someone to read or sing poetry to me. My husband actually does a pretty good job of this when he gets into one of his let-me-read-you-all-the-lyrics-to-this-song-and-tell-you-exactly-what-it-means moods.

The whole act of writing is communal, after all. Unless it’s a diary (and even then sometimes), the transaction is only complete when someone reads it. It becomes that much more complex when someone reads it to you or an artist performs it, especially in person. I look forward to engaging once more in such communion of concerts and theatre, recitals and school concerts, hymns and choruses when this dang pandemic is finally over.

About More Time

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(Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash)

My time got away from me this week and I remembered this silly thing I once wrote many years ago during the busy pre-season of Christmas when I was pressed for time:

I hit upon a blockbuster idea the other day as my husband flipped his way past an infomercial on television. You know – the kind of idea that could potentially send you on your way to millionaire status faster than you can say, “Is that your final answer?” After all, my husband’s idea of working for a living isn’t getting us there and Jean Pare has already written all of my cookbooks and the bank won’t let us put up a McDonald’s franchise in Vermilion without a down-payment. Huh, go figure.

“Let’s get a spot on the Home Shopping Network!” I cried. “We can sell time! Just think of it! We could sell an hour for five bucks, three hours for twenty! People would call in from all over the world asking for more time! They wouldn’t be able to get enough!”

My husband looked sideways at me like he was thinking I had spent too much time hovering over the glue bottle when last crafting with the kids, so I knew he wasn’t giving any credence to my grandiose scheme. Granted, there would be a packaging and delivery problem but those were things I would let him figure out. After all, radio and television stations are constantly selling time and at a much more exorbitant rate. Why couldn’t we?

The trouble was, it was already too late, what with the shipping and handling problems, to really capitalize on the Christmas market, when people would really be after our product. Not only would they be able to give the gift of time to so many people on their list, they indefinitely would buy a little extra time for themselves. Admit it: who doesn’t buy themselves one or two things when they’re buying all those nice gifts for other people? And who wouldn’t want another hour of vacation, or just more time to read a good book, have coffee with a friend, or even sleep a little longer?

I spent some more time thinking about the idea (don’t worry, I have plenty) and realized that no sooner would we begin our little venture than people would probably start taking the time! Without a patent (some Big Guy probably already has it) people would rapidly catch on that we don’t have a monopoly on time and pretty soon any schmuck would be throwing away time like they had a whole lifetime’s worth. And to top it off they would use it on fruitless things like watching infomercials on TV, reading blogs, and shoveling Alberta sidewalks. Right?

[Ah! Time! As I watch the COVID numbers ramp up and down and wait (patiently?) for a return to gatherings and vacations, I hope I am using whatever time I have wisely.]

About Canadian Geese

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Photo by Crystal Jo on Unsplash

We’re not travelling very much these days with The Whole Covid Thing. And we’re certainly not crossing any borders except maybe past the big red border markers in Lloydminster. So it’s kind of fascinating to think about how the Canadian geese that proliferate the fields and sloughs at this time of year make their semi-annual trek north and south without any regard for travel bans.

I love Canadian geese. When I was driving some distance in the car recently, I was able to enjoy mile after mile of geese flying in the air and dancing on small ice floes. Plus I witnessed a few cow-and-goose get-togethers in some pastures, the two species standing around a grain buffet like it was a cocktail party. Maybe it’s the “Canadian” moniker that makes me so affectionate towards them, both patriotic and possessive. Maybe it’s just that they are one of the first happy heralds to spring, arriving while there’s still ice on the pond and the threat of a spring blizzard. It’s like they don’t care, they just want to get home even if they didn’t send anyone ahead to turn up the heat in house after a long time away.

There’s also the whole “mates for life” thing. The deeper into spring we get, the less often you see whole flocks. Instead, you witness couples scouting out a place to nest or just having tea for two. I’m a little sad when I see three geese hanging out, because I assume some heartbreak must have occurred for one (or all three). I actually saw one silly goose lolling about in the rocks and muddy leftovers of a former snow pile in a Superstore parking lot like he was the last customer in the pub, maybe looking for love where there was none to be found. Eventually he flew away, drunkenly.

My assumptions may be completely off base. Maybe some geese don’t want to be hitched, tied down or coupled – just like some humans . Geese are known for their adaptability, so why not their individuality, too? I mean, I can’t tell apart one from the other but they certainly know who their significant other is, if they have one. Some enjoy living in the country, others make their nests on the roofs of high-rises. They always seem to figure things out.

Nearly twenty years ago, there was a terrible drought around here. The sloughs dried up and the geese, it seemed, went away. But no, they didn’t. They just figured out where they had to go to find water. My boys and I would find thousands of them congregated in the Vermilion Provincial Park where the river swells at the bottom of the toboggan hill, a whole convention of geese (loudly) discussing their ideas of what they should do next.

Every day, we turn on the news and listen to all the silly geese talking about what’s going to happen – as if anyone really knows. The real geese have it figured out: head to north in the spring, find someone to love and include a lonely third. Don’t judge where others live. And eventually plan a big trip with a bunch of friends or family to someplace warm. Not so silly after all.