everyday i walk through the park and everyday i hope i will see the canada geese. i like them and the way they honk and chase each other. i like how cantankerous and shitty they can get when small children or dogs get too close. i like watching their little babies, the tiny goslings, especially when they get all awkward and teenagery looking.

i bring them little snacks sometimes, vegetables or blueberries, a handful of oats, and i watch them watching me. there’s this pair of geese that know me and they see me coming and get close, almost close enough for me to touch and i watch them and they are beautiful to me.

when i was a child, my grandfather bought me this book called “the gumboot geese” by anne cameron about some canada geese, a story set in powell river, bc, the place my mother grew up.

my grandfather thought the geese were beautiful too. he had binoculars and notebooks and wrote about all the birds he would see, documentation for no one.

he collected feathers and bones and a squirrel’s tail he found one on the road. he would have loved that movie “where the crawdads sing” about that lady who collected natural things and documented the natural world and eventually killed someone. i think he would have thought that was really something.

i’ve been thinking about my grandfather lately, because he would have been 93 in january. he was born the day before me and i think maybe this is why he understood me so well. two aquarians picking up feathers and writing in our journals and staying up late to watch documentaries about birds and mummies in egypt.

i found a goose feather at the park last week, and it made me feel really lucky, i don’t know why.

it felt like a gift from the geese, and it felt like a gift from my grandfather.

i still remember the day my father died, and i was at home afterwards and all i wanted to do was call my grandfather because i felt like he would know what to say, know what to do. grandpa had been dead for years and still that instinct remained. i guess that’s love.

i wish i could show my grandfather this goose feather. i think he would think it was really neat.

so i share it here instead as a prayer for the gumboot geese, and a prayer for our grandfathers.

isaiah 40:31