There are times in nature when everything is just as it should be. And that's the way it was on this cool spring morning in a backwater pond, where a family of geese basked in the sun's warmth, blessed with the peaceful sounds of a beautiful day.
As I stopped on the footbridge that joined two pieces of paved path, I felt a bit like an intruder, an intruder who saw something so sweet that he had to drink it in, and then capture it with his camera, so that, days in the future, he might look at the photo of that family of geese there in the sunlight on that backwater pond, and while he looked, maybe he could remember how he felt when he was right there, standing on that footbridge.
But the photo came to mean more to me than the means to drift back to a pleasant day from my past. The innocence of those sweet babies under the watchful eyes of parents represent for me what it means to be part of a family. And I can't look at this photograph without remembering days like that in my childhood, when my mother and my father did their very best to protect me from the dangers outside and within the confines of our little sharecropper farm in South Carolina back in the 1950s.
And, like those baby geese, as I got older, I got bolder. One of the goslings was quite adventurous. I related to that, having been an adventurous little gosling myself. As I watched, more than once the bolder baby goose strayed a little too far, resulting in some instructive honking from the father goose. In my case, it was my mother who did the honking, except it wasn't honking.
When I strayed too far off down in the woods, or too far down the dirt road that went past our little three-room home, a road that led to an abandoned old house about a mile away, my father might come and find me, but he would bring me back to my mother, all the while, telling me that I was in trouble now. Then, she would go get a hickory stick and apply it to my backside in a quite unpleasant way.
The adventurous baby goose would always come back when instructed, but a few moments later he would strike out again. I was just like that too. Except, in my case, it might be a few days before I forgot how that hickory stick stung when it swatted against my backside.
And so today, much older now, with both parents long since passed away, I sit here at my computer screen looking at an old photo of two baby geese, with their parents there to protect them. I look at that photograph and I feel a little lost. My days of innocence are long gone. And I've been out of the loving protection of my parents for over 50 years.
I'm thankful that I'm not completely without supportive family.
And I have to occasionally remind myself that I had those 50 years to prepare for this life that I created for myself. But even knowing that, from time to time I will look at this photograph and feel my eyes well up ... as I remember how good it felt to know the protective warmth and the love of my mother and father.