Lessons from Goslings

bumbling and stumbling along

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer helps me along my days standing on the launch runway where I will stay after Hadley flies. She tells of goslings, “milky, down - fluffy, bodies stumbling in the tall green grass” and I say, “I saw them, too!”

Except they weren’t in the grass. the goslings I saw were walking on the edge of the curb of the street in the morning rush of getting to work and school. They were in no hurry, their bodies matched the color of the morning - milky and grey like Rosemerry’s goslings but with a stain of blue. They bumbled along like it was their job to do this dangerous thing - be out in the world with the rest of us.

The mother goose walked in the street, guarding them. Why doesn’t she push them toward the grass and away from the street? I thought. Why let your offspring do this dangerous thing? Why put yourself in danger?

Rosemerry feels a tenderness, “an inexorable softening” seeing the goslings. She writes that lately she seems to take hopelessness everywhere she goes, and seeing the goslings stumbling and waddling along helped with that.

Carrying hopelessness has some purpose to it, then. I mean, sure it’s the birds but maybe too, is the acknowledgement of what we carry and when you see the baby birds you understand that you’re actually carrying hope in disguise. Hope protected. Hope looking for a way out; to be let go. That’s why it’s so heavy. You can’t protect hope. She needs to bumble along that edge so she’ll fly.

//

Hadley’s last high school soccer game was last week. Her team lost in two overtimes.

“Hadley’s going to be devestated,” Jesse said as we watched her on the field with her teammates. They all looked like they were in shock.

It had been raining on and off all night. The stadium lights turned on even though this time of year in Michigan Light stays up late partying. This night she must’ve been hungover or lost some battle with the dark. Mist like splats of tears that fall from eyelashes fell on the girls as they played.

It was dark. It was the ref. It was the end of the school year and the girls were exhausted. It was slippery, probably like that curb the goslings waddled on - their brand new bodies blending into the murky day.

It was none of this and all of it.

Hadley climbed the stadium stairs for the last time, carrying the same backpack she’s used for soccer since she was 8. I wondered, as she trudged closer to us, if she’d ever carry that bag again. If it was, if she’d hang it up that night and walk toward whatever’s next, I wanted her to hang it up with pride and gratitude. But that is not for me to choose and define. I knew this as she got closer and steadied myself to listen for whatever it is she needed to be and feel and say.

“That was an awesome game!” Harper said. She wasn’t talking about the outcome. She was talking about the game. She meant it was great because something was at stake. Because it was intense. Because there is nothing like bumbling, stumbling, waddling, and eventually running alongside an edge before you fly. “I’m so glad I got to see it,” Harper said.

“Me too,” I said, believing that hopelessness uses anything it can to turn itself into hope; to show us what it really is meant to be.