There’s a pair of geese that, last year, arrived one spring day to live on the patch of grass in front of the building across the alley. They were, as geese so often are, a terror and a nuisance. They hissed at people walking by on the sidewalk; the pavement became a goose shit minefield. Despite the amount of time I spent watching them from our window, I couldn’t figure out if they were actually nesting. I saw no egg, and besides, this particular lawn is a nonsensical place to try and start a family: unshaded, adjacent to a busy street, subject to the leers of nosy people like me.
Whatever their intentions, the geese stayed there for months, so much a part of the landscape that their sudden absence really snuck up on me. There are geese that leave, and, more and more with climate change, there are geese that stay, and I’d assumed that these particular geese were geese that would stay. But they didn’t. It was cold, finally, and the little lawn was silent. And the cold and the silence felt natural, too, as natural as the loud, aggressive presence of the geese had become, and gradually I forgot all about them, as though I had never known them at all.I used to hate the arrival of spring. For a decade, I was mostly nocturnal. The lengthening of daylight hours encroached on the darkness, the time when I felt the most safe; the ever-earlier arrival of sunshine in the morning seemed to be mocking me, my inability to operate on the schedule of the living world, the pathetic tiredness with which I dragged myself out of bed and shaded my eyes. As a kid, of course, I reveled in the light, spent as many hours as I could in it, but something happened when I was a teenager. I had never gotten a sunburn in my life — suddenly, even an hour in clouded sunlight would roast me. Heat made me feel ill. And I couldn’t stand the idea of the people, the crowds of people drawn out inevitably at the first hint of the rain’s retreat. I hid myself, the curtains drawn and the lights off, trying to make my room into my own controlled environment, permanently cool and dark: a pocket of permanent nighttime.
I was looking through my emails earlier this week, trying to find a question about how I should grade a particular assignment that I was sure I had asked last year. I discovered that I had asked it exactly a year ago — a year ago to the day, almost to the hour. Finding this email transported me, as if by magic, back to the state of mind I was in as I sent it. One of the other TAs had chosen to simply not grade almost all of the assignments they were supposed to, resulting in a backlog of over 100 assignments dating back to January. Every time I logged into Canvas, it made me more and more stressed out. The weeks passed with no intervention from the instructor, the students were becoming justifiably upset, and so, in the same email, I asked if I could get extra hours to grade all of the assignments the other TA had abandoned.
Doubling my job, on top of everything else I was trying to do at the time, made me feel miserable, obviously, my life taken over by the repetitive mental strain of trying to come up with feedback for hundreds of undergraduate creative writing assignments, and I felt horrible and exhausted and swore I would never do anything like that again. The irony is that this year, I decided to double my TA hours for the entire term. It was so haunting, looking at that email, to be confronted with how exact of a pattern I was following, my to-the-hour return to the same stress I had taken upon myself unprompted a year ago. And I act like I don’t know why I keep doing this, but I do, of course I do: because I know stress, and I know fear, and I know how to say yes, I can do this, it’s no problem, I’ve got it, and it is scary, scary and new, not to close the blinds when the sun rises — to feel the shock of light in your eyes.I am desperate for spring these days, desperate for the warmth and the return of the light, for early morning writing, full of plans and visions of myself on the beach, in the ocean, in the trees, on long, long bike rides, on ferries and buses and trains — in constant motion, going and going and going, the way it was when I was a kid, the way it wasn’t for ten years. It doesn’t feel like I’ve changed so much as it feels like I’ve come back. Exactly ten years. Like it had been scheduled — like I was following a plan, somehow, that even I didn’t know about.
At some point last week, I looked out the window and saw that the geese were back. “Look,” I proclaimed to anyone in my apartment who might be listening, “the geese are back!” And I pointed out the window at them, there on that little square of lawn, in that habitual position of theirs: one of them seated, the other wandering around, long-necked and threatening, securing the perimeter. Everyone could see them. There was no need for proclamation, nor for pointing. But it seemed worth it, to me, to notice that they were back.
When I walked outside, then, I fully expected to walk by them on that lawn, the way I had so many times last spring. But to my surprise, they weren’t there. I wondered, for a second, what might have befallen them — could it have been the scraggly neighborhood raccoon? — but my wondering lasted only a moment, because as I walked by the doorway of the building, I saw the trail of poop, and I heard the angry honking, and I knew that even the geese, who are birds, can return to the same place and change nonetheless. For all purposes other than human harassment, their new spot is even worse than the old one. But maybe they know better than I do.I look forward to avoiding them for the rest of the summer.
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I'm half-convinced human harassment is a primary motivation.