The world was on lockdown, but the local pond didn’t get the memo. Tadpoles, frogs, and ducks were living their best lives, doing all the typical springtime things, while lily pads floated on the surface like floppy plates. I thought I’d stumbled into the pages of a coloring book.
Having nowhere else to go, my husband and I visited the pond daily with our 6- and 8-year-olds. Talk of how to find toilet paper filled our texts, but the turtles around us did their business without any thought to supply-chain issues.
One afternoon, we watched a medium-sized box turtle repeatedly dig her hind legs into the earth. I thought she was stuck—like a sedan spinning its wheels in mud—until I spotted the egg she dropped right into the hole.
The geese, though, ended up offering the richest plot. “Pests,” New Jersey locals called them. They ack-acked at you, casting side-eyed looks. Get too close, and they’d sometimes hiss you away, dropping Tootsie-Roll-sized doo-doo along the way.
But this spring, one goose sat in her spot under a tree and wouldn’t budge. A neighbor—from 6 feet away—whispered conspiratorially: “Expecting!” The goose’s partner swam in circles nearby, on guard.
And then one day they appeared—fragile, fuzz-ball goslings with feathers like citron mohair.
Skip a week and you missed their radical evolution. They grew long necks. Then brown feathers. Then they turned gangly and learned to swim in a line between their parents.
Suddenly, just weeks after birth, they became teenagers. Now they ack-acked us away, and their parents stood back, possibly proud of their success. Their children no longer needed them.
Meanwhile, our kids needed help with Zoom lessons and snacks. So my husband and I lingered there a moment, in awe of the duck-teens, realizing we’d just witnessed at breakneck speed what happens for human families, too. A day would come when we’d stand by and watch our children ack-ack their way into the world.
Heather Lanier is the author of the memoir Raising a Rare Girl and the poetry collection Psalms of Unknowing.
