1 November, or Why Geese Matter

Welcome, November.

I apparently missed all of October on this web-log, so an explanation:

– We grew very serious about purchasing a home, then through what must have been a million conversations, many of them in the front seat of a silent car, many more with tears, chose to wait.

– We are currently growing very serious about purchasing a new car. This is a more tender process to me, if only because Little Pig, our Volvo with 210,000 (and counting) miles, has carried us over many, many mountain passes, literal and metaphorical. I’m sad that she is a bit too small, and a bit too precarious, to carry Baby.

– We traveled to Boston, separately, in one week.

– We learned more about the health and sex of little side(or front?)kick, and we finally, finally! found a nurse midwife who dispenses the thoughtful advice and hugs and commitment we’ve so badly wanted.

Taken together, this is probably the steepest learning curve I’ve ever encountered. I’m grateful it comes with naps.

It also comes with the very unexpected, very quiet occasional heartache.

I woke up to the sound of geese flying high above our house this morning. In a city, the presence of geese means the presence of goose poop, of angry beaks that snap at a curious dog, of something to avoid at the beach. In the rest of my life, or my earlier life, geese signal something else. They accompany the sharp, crisp smell of autumn leaves. They fly overhead as I walk across brittle, knobby marsh grasses or run through empty corn fields. Somehow, in some magnificent and almost embarrassing way, the  honking and flapping wings this morning made my memories rush in: an icy nose, hot, homemade doughnuts, stomping boots, beloved, now unfamiliar men in blaze orange, moonlit hikes, tracing the sandy edge of the Baraboo River with my dad.

I lay tucked below a quilt, my husband’s arm around my belly, and listened to the call and response overhead. At times like these, my heart feels such urgency, and such a magnificent and almost embarrassing desire to give Baby other geese, and that fresh air, and those memories.