Canada goose for day 6 of daily sketching in October. I encountered this goose the first spring after the winter I moved to the so-called Hudson Valley a few years ago. The intensity of winter and then the equal intensity of the spring was deeply disconcerting — it’s very different from the Mediterranean climate of the Bay Area, where my heart and soul (and at least some of the the pattern-recognition parts of my mind) still resided.1
This encounter was a bit downriver from where I live now, at a river park where there are always many Canada geese in the warmer months. I don’t see as many Canada geese up here, still on the so-called Hudson River — they must be here somewhere, but not in the places I tend to go. It’s mostly gulls and ducks that I notice on the river now, and bald eagles overhead, and swans in the marsh.
- My soul will always belong to the Pacific; though, as it turns out, there is part of it that can belong to the river, as well. ↩︎