Today I took my usual walk with my mom around the lake, counting goslings as we went. We kept an eye out for very young ones. Had Mrs. Goose’s eggs hatched?

When we got to her nest, we found it empty! But before we could get too excited, a fisherman stepped up and told us that over the weekend a couple of teen-aged boys had thrown rocks at the goose, chased her and her mate away from the nest, and destroyed the eggs. The fisherman, who seemed to know such things, said the eggs would have hatched in about a week.

I don’t even know what to write about this, except that I am so sad. I knew when I found her nest that she’d chosen a bad location, off a concrete promontory the fishermen use to reach deeper water, where kids go to skip stones across the lake, where ladies like me go to feed the birds. And I guess a few of us had made Mrs. Goose our special pet.

My husband says a lot of boys these days – and you must be getting old when you start to say “these days” – that a lot of them don’t have fathers in their lives, and they try to be men and they don’t know how. So they do senseless, violent things. (Yikes! is that how they think men are?) I don’t know. I don’t know who the kids were.

But just now I want to round up all the mothers and fathers in town and tell them to teach their children kindness, to teach them to be human.

May you have a gentle day.

(Thanks to Jeff Jones for the image. You take better pictures of geese
than I do.)
P.S. Updates to this story here.