The Looe geese take off all in swathes, like kites ascending to the sky all in one go, memories of Southsea Kite Festival from home float through my mind, but that’s a summer thing, these geese carry notes of an autumn turning to winter.
There’s a field within a field opposite my flat back home, fenced off with weathered wooden planks, darkened from many seasons, where in winter Canadian geese descend, land, and spend their few months as my over-the-road neighbours. They seem quieter back home, or maybe I just pay attention less, the call of work, or washing, or something, is more alarming to my eyes and ears than the whereabouts of my temporary winter neighbours outside and along a bit from my window.
The geese semi-circle round again, shouting as they do, as if they are rounding each other up, encouraging each other on, each one a professional cheerleader. There are so many, too many to name or count, so many that they look like a holy blanket in the sky, one made of lace and trinketed with holes from age. Age has a way of doing that, it makes holes, loses pieces, like parts of your memory. It’s not carelessness as such, but with time you gather more and sometimes there’s too much to hold, and dropping stones isn’t always a bad thing. Time wears away at the fragment of us, until sometimes we lose us completely. It wears away your favourite jumper until time pokes through with her relentless fingers, daylight where there wasn’t daylight before can now be seen through the wearing and delicate threads, the vitality of youth, lost. Time takes away, makes us drop stones, but she also gives to us too: moments of incomparable beauty, of stillness, of quiet, of nature, just being nature, like geese flying overhead, carefree and full of intention.