Day Two

When school started this year, the kids and I traveled past the Middle School to get to the Charter schools where the girls go.  As always, there is that moment of passing the fields where we look for those darn geese.  You might remember the geese?  The Canadian Geese that stop off in the fields for several weeks waiting to travel south in the Winter and north in the Spring.  Other than the fact that their mother gets excited by the geese, I am not so sure why the girls get excited to see the geese, but every time they do.  Why do I?  I am not certain of that either, I just know that they pull at me, touching something deep inside of me that I connect with whenever I see them.

This year the geese brought friends, a lot of friends.  The group has grown considerably into the forties or fifties in fact, so definitely a good spring and summer for our feathered friends.  We watched them for weeks and each day they moved to another part of the field.  On a Friday morning, they had pushed themselves almost to the fence and so very close to the road.  I told the girls to notice this because it meant they had ate almost everything available on the field and had to finally approach the roadway.  There is a large fence around the field so the probability of the geese getting hurt was not possible, but the noise of people and traffic was surely a nuisance for them.  The girls took note, and they enjoyed the chance to see the geese so close.  As they disappeared behind us I told the girls, "Just watch, by Monday they will have moved on and then maybe in a week or two the other group will come...our little group."

When we moved up here and saw the geese the first time, we marveled at the large group, but a few weeks later, when the group had moved on the small group of five had moved in.  We connected to them because there were five like us.  New in the area, we were pretty isolated, and with Bradley's health, we are still pretty isolated today.  But we felt something special in this little group that would land with an ailing member and nurse it back to health, finally moving on together.  We had an ailing member and we rallied around him to nurse him back to health too - someday, we will move on together as well.

Years pass quickly and each spring and fall we are reminded to stop and think about how a family is supposed to take care of each other whenever we see our geese.  For just as surely as the large group moved on; yesterday morning, the little group landed.  They are still little, but there are eight of them now.  Each one looks big and beautiful and so healthy.  Their arrival a mere week after the larger group, their stay, only a day before they took to the winds and disappeared again.  They have moved on, they healed together, grew together and now they have moved on together.

We may not be completely healed, any of us, but I think we are moving forward if not moving on.  Bradley's health is a constant question in our lives, but we feel like he is getting stronger.  We try not to think too much that he is moving out of his problems because that leads to a lull in our wariness and any crash back into wariness is a painful crash.  We try to be cautiously optimistic about just taking each day as it comes, taking each moment of bad health with concentration and follow through to keep it from becoming something larger.
My hope is that someday our group will be healthy and strong and we will all move on together, maybe we won't be joining in with the big group again, maybe we'll always be our own little family, but even the geese grew a little - so someday we will too.  I'm trying to teach the kids that if we rely on each other and take care of each other the size of our group will not matter.  Together we are going to get stronger and we are going to move on.  That being said, this little group is always willing to add someone to our "V" that needs us as much as we need them.  Join our flock, we might not be flying the furthest or the the highest "today" but we will be and wouldn't you hate to look up and see us go by and not be a part of that?  Knowing that you could have been.