Old Habits and Dying Hard

Image by kukkurovaca via Flickr

Happily, I am back to my old habit -- which the events of the past semester interrupted -- of driving E. to work, parking our car and walking home past Lake Merritt. I wish I'd taken the camera this morning.

In spring and early summer, sometimes you see geese and goslings. Today next to the lake I saw a whole ... clutch? clump? I saw elder geese standing by while the little ones -- their stubby wings as flightworthy as thumbs -- huddled together next to the lake.

That's the lesson of warm blood. It's good to get close.

But then they/you/me grow up.

There were about 20 of the brown little dandelions, as fuzzy as mold. E. told me that when you see so large a group of young geese and only a few adults, that's because the stronger geese seize the offspring of the weaker geese and create a little tribe of ours and everybody else's. So somewhere bereft parents honk plaintively, instinct rewarded and then thwarted.

Still, I wish I had a picture of the babies and their bandit parents. Mother Nature's a Rorschach, isn't she?