Something inside me instantly feels happy whenever I hear the honk of a goose flying overhead. Some geese are pretty and some are plain. Some are bigger than others and some are stronger than others. But NONE of them can be trusted.
Geese are so mean that you could have one as a guard goose for your house if you are allergic to dogs. They are pretty smart, too, but that doesn't make up for their meanness.
If you go to the park at Town Lake by McKinney High School, they will swarm you and surround you expecting food. They will mug you as a gang.
They even made a GAME about how horrible geese are.
When I was little we lived in the country on 20 acres and our geese terrorized the lawn, the fields, the driveway, and the road. They pretty much stayed out of the blueberry patch and they didn't go into the woods either. (But the turkeys did. They would fly up into the trees and not come down when it was time to go back into their coop at night. That's because turkeys are stupid.) We did our best to steer clear of them because, besides all of the greasy goose poop everywhere, if we got too close to them their heads would go down, their wings would go up and they would charge at us hissing.
The winter when my sister and I were either 3 and 5 or 4 and 6, my mom bundled us from head to toe in coats and hats and mittens and scarves to go somewhere (probably somewhere boring like the grocery store). We started down the dirt road that we lived on and we hadn't made it very far when my mom realized she forgot something important (probably her purse) and we had to turn around. We were already grumpy from not being able to move in all our layers and from having to go Someplace Boring and now turning around was just going to make this unwanted trip take longer. But you can't buy groceries without money so we turned. Back at the house Mom left the car running and went inside while we sat and stewed, both figuratively and almost literally. We waited and waited and waited and we got hotter and hotter and hotter. I looked up into the kitchen window and saw that she was ON! THE! PHONE! We panicked because we knew how long she could stay on the phone. She could have been an Olympic Phone Talker. UGH! We sat still for a few more minutes because she told us to, but that only lasted until Mary started whining about being hot so we decided to just go in.
Our house only had grass/lawn on the sides, not in the front. The whole front of the house was an open, gravel driveway and in winter Bopa would plow all the snow from the driveway up against the house. This not only cleared the driveway, it helped insulate the house. It also gave us excellent King of the Mountain snowbanks to play on and sometimes they were higher than the windows. Since this was the early 1970's, we weren't strapped into car seats of any kind which made escaping the car/oven easy. We weren't parked far from the front door, but opening our car doors, rolling out of them and slamming them shut gave the geese enough time to come running around the corner of the house to try to kill us. I calculated the distance from the car to the front door, trying to decide if I had enough time to actually open the latch (with mittens on) and drag myself and Mary through it to the safety of the porch. The honking and hissing exploded in my ears and I could hear their webbed feet stomping on the packed snow like a herd of hungry lions going after two weak baby gazelles. Well, it was more like "pat-pat pat-pat pat-pat pat-pat" but it had the same murderous energy.
I changed my mind about trying to make it inside the house and knew from experience that we couldn't outrun them even without an extra 35 pounds of clothes on. I figured our only salvation was to get to the top of the snowbank. I shouted at Mary, "Get up the snowbank!" and started to scramble up out of their way but when I looked behind me, I realized Mary was never going to make it. Never. She was doomed from the moment she tumbled out of the car and presented herself as slow, fresh meat. I, myself, was only halfway up, but I slid back down and got behind her and pushed her up that snowbank. She was squirming on her stomach, reaching and kicking her way to a level spot which meant I was still at least one child-length away from the top when I felt a tug.
I was under attack.
One of the geese (probably the meanest one) had my scarf in his beak and pulled me back down. He was yanking and yanking my scarf making my head bob back and forth, trying to give me whiplash and BEATING my sides with his wings. All the the other geese flapped their wings and cheered him on. Mary laid there like a slug. It was her only defense. Just kidding. That's from Christmas Story. Mary stood on top of the snowbank and cried. I screamed. The geese all honked in delight and fury. Finally, my mom heard the commotion and rescued me.
And we STILL had to go to the boring store.
So that, dear one, is why you should never trust a goose. And I had the bruises on my butt to prove it.
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