I hate geese. I am an animal lover extraordinaire, with the exception of geese. You may wonder why this particular species engenderers such anathema, what could cause a sane, rational, mature woman who is otherwise very kind, to feel the way I do.

When I was five years old we moved from the coast of Oregon to Montana. My Grammy and Grandpa had moved there to homestead and my parents decided to go out too. The ocean air was hard on my lungs and I was sick all the time. There was a 100 acre farm for me to run around on, to build up my strength.

We drove to Montana in a chartreuse 1950 Ford. Mama filled the back seat with pillows and put my baby brother in an apple box beside me. I was in charge of him because I was reliable and loved babies. I could change a diaper as well as women four times my age. There were no seat belts back then, so our nest was for safety as well as for sleeping.

I was so excited the day we left. We were going on an adventure. To a sickly little girl who only attended four weeks of 1st grade, and spent the remainder of the time in bed, ill with fever, this was the best thing that ever happened. I had been put in first grade at five. By then I read out of medical books and huge mysterious tomes. They passed me to second grade by having teacher give me a skills test. I loved school, read everything and made up rhymes all the time.

My brother Richard was my obsession. Unlike an older child who resents the newcomer, I fell right into taking care of him and would rock him by the hour. He was four months-old when he rode to Montana in an apple box. Everything about him was sweet-smelling and fascinating. Mama had given me two coloring books and a box of crayons, but I spent most of the trip fussing over the baby.

As we were crossing the mountain pass, getting close to our destination, I heard my Mama gasp and the next thing I knew she was over the back of the seat, holding my face into the pillows, shrieking, “Don’t look!” It was years later that I learned there had been an accident and a man was decapitated, his lifeless head on the hood of his pickup. Most likely I would never have looked, but the incident loomed large in my child’s mind and I was crazy with curiosity, and my fertile imagination went right straight to work. A big deal only becomes a big deal if someone points it out. When I raised my children I remembered this incident and forced myself not to overreact to something a child might not even notice.

The snow in the pass captured my senses. That was the first snow I had ever seen. There may have been snow on the Oregon Coast, but it was never in such huge, random piles. Near the top we had to stop and wait for a road grader to plow a path for the cars in line. A pilot car would select five waiting travelers and guide them across to the start of the down side. Several times during our slow slide down, families of deer would hop down hills and run across the road. Daddy would apply the brakes and curse at the deer, but we didn’t hit one. There were all kinds of animals around. I would ask Mama what each one was and copy it down in my treasure book.

Daddy and Mama took turns driving the Ford. I had to keep Richard absolutely quiet while Daddy napped in the passenger seat. Daddy was a good man, a hard worker and a fair man, but he had a mean temper to him, and everybody worked real hard to help him not lose it. I would hold Richard to my chest and Mama would tie a dish towel around him and tie it at my back. For hours I would coo to him and rock him. The most special feeling in this world is a warm little baby next to your heart. He was the first of many babies I mothered. Now the babies are grown, but my two ferrets now receive the rocking. My female will sleep for hours being held.

I could tell when we were going into Montana. Daddy stopped the Ford on the gravel to the side of the road. Mama got out and they took turns taking pictures of all of us underneath a big sign that said, “Welcome to Montana, the Big Sky Country”. There was a long way to go yet, but this was the official seal on our trip.

The air had become sweet and warm, and Daddy rolled down the windows. I savored that fresh air blowing across my face. The smells were wonderful. Flowers and farms and huge fields of wheat each contributed to the intoxicating brew. Everything was new and different, and though I had cried about having to leave the ocean behind, this country put its spell on me from the start.

Grammy lived seven miles outside of Kalispell. We went from the highway to a tar road and then to a crushed gravel road. Mama had lived in Montana before. She had kin everywhere. My grandfather and his young new wife lived in Whitefish with their three children, my mother’s step-brothers and step-sister. Iola was a big, comfy woman who taught school in Whitefish for years. I didn’t want to betray my loyalty to Grammy, so I tried real hard not to like her, but she was so sweet it was impossible.

For the moment though, these were future people. Grammy’s ranch was way out in the country. Finally my Mama sighted the house that was captured on film by Grammy’s old Kodak with its fold-out lens. I hadn’t know what to expect, so I was enchanted with everything. All the way out my folks had murmured about Grammy’s imagination and how the ranch was just a plain old homestead. As we turned down the gravel road to the dirt track I tried to drink in every single sensation. To memorize everything I saw. A wonderful little white cottage sat off the road. There was a big red barn out back and several outbuildings. There were flowers everywhere. Grammy passed her love of gardening on to me.

There was fuss and turmoil as Mama and Grammy cried and Walter, her new husband, and Daddy shook hands. Grandpa swooped me up and asked me what I thought about everything. I was mute. Sensory overload rendered me speechless. But Grandpa still smelled like Grandpaa mixture of flannel shirts and the old briar pipe he kept clenched between his big yellow teeth. He understood that the baby would be the center of attention and took care to make me feel important too.

Grammy still peered quizzically through her wire-framed glasses, her sweet blue eyes a little bit out of focus. She was a little bit of a woman, not even close to five feet tall. So Grandpa put me down and she swooped me up in her floury, flowered apron and I felt serenity fill the world.

The electric hadn’t yet made it the seven miles out to Grammy’s. Grammy hated the electric anyway. Warm candles and kerosene lamps put soft edges on the world at night. There was an outhouse way out back, and once I smelled it, I understood its isolation. Right behind the house was a big mound with a door in it. The root cellar that kept foods over the winter. I excused myself to the bathroom, or outhouse in this case, and began running down the well-worn path. I had just passed the first outbuilding when something came roaring out of hiding, hissing and squawking, wings a million miles wide. It was there I became acquainted with the species know as goose. Before Grandpa could reach me these foul fowl pushed at me with their wings and screeched so loudly I was sure I would go deaf.

Candy and Dandy, the ranch geese. One or the other of them kept nipping at my shirt and trying to get their beaks around my thin arms. Grandpa finally rescued me and sent the homicidal couple to the side of the shed. The adults were all laughing and I realized it was something I was supposed to find amusing.

Candy and Dandy stood at the edge of the outbuilding, still hissing and flapping their enormous wings. Grandpa walked me on past them and let me continue to the outhouse. I had never used an outhouse before. Since there were no gas stations or rest areas back then, travelers found a brushy spot to make a stop, and I had done that many times. The outhouse stood on a little hill, and had a half-moon in the door. The boards were rough and uneven. When I pulled on the leather strap to open the door a cloud of flies were buzzing inside. Big blue bottle flies that shone shiny in the sunshine peering through the sides. The smell hit me and for a minute I considered just going back to the house, but I had to go so I stepped up inside. There were two holes with wooden lids and the obligatory Sears and Roebuck catalogs.

Somehow I managed not to fall into the rancid holes and wiped myself with a page of wringer washers. I would have taken a deep breath, but the stench would probably have leveled me.

Watching carefully through a crack in the outhouse door, I looked around for the disastrous duo. They were no where to be seen, so I started down the path to the house. As I came even with the tack room I heard murmuring noises. My young girl instinct just knew it was the geese again. It was. Out from around the tack room they came, heathens from hell.

Grammy’s ranch was wonderful. I ran around so much that first day that I was awake all night screaming with cramps. It was my first memory of pain. Grammy and Mama took turns massaging my calves. Grammy got a jar of bear grease and worked it into my legs. Finally I fell asleep, after one of Grammy’s hot toddies. The nastiest stuff you ever put in your mouth. It was her cure for everything and I grew to dread any sign of infirmity that might call for forcing that noxious fluid down my throat. It had another benefit though. It was whiskey laced with lemon and who knows what else. I never had to worry about becoming a drinker - just the smell of whiskey nauseates me.

Next day the time finally came when I couldn’t put off a trip to the outhouse any longer. I prayed one of the adults would escort me past those Nazi geese. Wrong. I was a big girl and they were only geese. As soon as they got used to me everything would be fine.

So, there I went, wobbling on legs that threatened to collapse beneath me. Fiery pain from my calves pulsing with my heartbeat. I slunk along as quietly as I could, looking for any sign of Candy and Dandy. About midway I heard a rustle and my heart went cold. It was a rustle of goose wings. Waiting, I knew I would never make it to the outhouse. Here they came! Bullying, biting and beating with their wings. Until they caught wind of the bear grease. Their beaks shook like castanets as they tried to wipe the grease off that they had gotten onto themselves from me.

Apparently geese don’t like the smell or taste of bear. Both of them backed off and turned to waddle away. Not feeling particularly sympathetic, I raised my arms out wide and went after the devilish duo, squawking at the top of my lungs. Then I began making bear noises, or what I perceived as bear noises. Those geese goose-stepped as fast as they could go. Shrieking in absolute rage, the geese headed for the barn without looking back.

I was intoxicated with power. For the next few years I rubbed myself with bear grease every day. It wasn’t much appreciated at school, but I didn’t care. As long as it kept those horrible geese away from me, I was thrilled. My little behind remembered the feeling of being goosed and I questioned God as to why He had to waste time making geese.

Bring on lions and hippos, Tasmanian Devils - I’ll take them all on. But if I never saw another goose again in my life I would be delighted.

Sherry Asbury is a Portland, Oregon fixture. Her work appears in all types of venues, and she is well-known as a advocate for the homeless and for domestic violence, with her work appearing regularity in a newspaper for the homeless. She lives with her two rescue-ferrets, Amber and Rascal.

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I don’t believe the good life could have been mine except for the grandparents I chose. They were not perfect by any means, but they were very intuitive. Somehow their parents, neighbors and peers did not discourage the imagination they were born with and they further developed it over the years. So we can say I am the child of imagination. All my grandparents married in their late twenties. During years of courtship they settled on matters of career, home life and common interests. By the first night of each honeymoon, both pairs had become passionate about raising the greatest children in the world. Both pairs succeeded. They later explained to their children why they were so successful as parents and created the same intuitive, imaginative, passionate children. They taught my parents that parenting would be the most important work they would ever love. They told them this work was hardly work at all when approached with care and imagination. They taught my parents all the things they don’t teach in schools. They taught my parents there was one hundred times the satisfaction in loving babies as in conceiving them. That deeply ingrained belief makes all the difference.

In passing on such great wisdom to the world, I write from a point of view that says life begins before conception. It begins when spirits come together long before bodies. Now I can know as a parent myself that it is parental attitude and viewpoint that creates the good life. Not only did my parents pass along the skills they learned from their parents, they improved and amplified them by discussing ideas they had before they married. They decided then that I should be one of the world’s greatest parents. Their parents were pleased and enthusiastic, offering unconditional support for the idea. We now have six people agreed and determined to create the world’s greatest grandchildren.

I don’t need to tell you how uncommon this is, even in the churches, where you would expect it to be fairly common. In fact, the churches were there to expand support to families. Government has gradually taken over that function and has never achieved a passing grade. Not in the schools and universities, not in public welfare, not in the day to day lawmaking. Instead we have instinctive parenting in a world where people have repressed their positive instincts, or had them repressed by their societies. Parenting became experimental by the fifties. It will take another fifty years before folks find the better ways. I’d like to speed that up some.

My parents were not especially athletic but they had learned how to be and remain very healthy. Their very activities and behaviors were chosen. They were taught that sickly parents rarely produce healthy children and little will steal one’s joy of life like illness. Due to both medical advances in the Twentieth Century and strong intuition, my parents had none of the illness my grandparents had known and were healthy in body, mind and spirit.

My parents both understood long before marriage that both parents should be in peak health at the time of conception because this affects the pregnancy and health of the fetus. They already knew that a healthy baby is much easier to live with because they had known sickly babies. They knew if the experience was not pleasant in the early years, they would be less inclined to repeat the experience. They decided together that they would not engage in family planning until they could judge how they were doing as parents. By the time they married, they were not just ready; they were eager and excited about being great parents.

A few months after my mom conceived me, I became aware that I was not alone. Somewhere out there was noise; some pleasant, some aggravating. Mostly, I was at peace and very comfortable. I really liked the comfort factor and took it for granted until there was a disruption. Sometimes I was cramped and found it difficult to move. Everything got very quiet and comfortable on a regular basis and I learned discomfort was always temporary. I had little cause to kick and thrash most of the time, so I didn’t do either often. I think mom enjoyed my occasional love taps to let her know I was alive, awake and comfortable. I decided not to do them when everything was still and quiet.

In a few more months I was distinguishing the sounds I heard. I really loved it when dad and mom were talking to each other. Somehow that was more comforting than when mom was talking to others. I did not hear dad as often as I would have liked and it seemed special to me when I did. We were all getting along so well, I had no complaint.

I also noticed that mom made different kinds of sounds and it always got my attention when her voice changed. I would later learn those differences were between talking, reading aloud and singing. My preference was the reverse order. When she sang, I wanted to sing too. But I didn’t know how and could not imagine how. I always believed that I would, in time.

When mom read aloud, I liked that too. Sometimes it was like when she sang. She later told me that was called poetry. Later I learned that she read everything out loud, right down to shopping lists and personal correspondence. Even when she was just talking, I would listen. I did not know what I was hearing and somehow I sensed that if I just kept listening, it would begin to make sense and I would be able to make these sounds too. I just had to be patient and decided that was OK.

From time to time, I heard mom playing piano and dad, guitar. Everything they played had an effect on me. If they played ballads I would nearly go to sleep. Sometimes I did. When they played up tempo tunes, I felt happier than usual. It was the same when they played the radio or recordings. I knew the difference and figured somehow others were performing things that made mom and dad happy. That was OK too. I liked it a lot whenever mom and dad were expressing joy and happiness. Once in a while the whole thing got a bit too intense for me, but it did not last so long I could not get to sleep.

Ed Howes sought and found, knocked and entered. Now he sees things differently. To see more of what he sees, please visit http://www.justanotherview.com or do an author search here at Ezine Articles.

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I have always thought that grandparents were the icons of wisdom, the “go to” person with he answers, the epitome of patience.

When I was young, I often thought, “When I grow up, I want to be like Grandpa”. I looked forward with anxious anticipation to the time when I would have all the answers and all the sage advice.

All of our parents are gone, now, and I have discovered, as I suppose they discovered, that all I have really done is gotten older.

I have learned that being a wise parent and grandparent is not so much what I know, but what I do. And the greatest truth I have learned is that one does not need to grow old to grow wise. The reality is that everyone grows older. What matters is what we keep and/or lose in the process.

We need to keep a sense of humor, but lose the mindless silliness of adolescence. We need to somehow keep our internal youthfulness but lose the irresponsibleness of adolescence. We need to retain our integrity while acknowledging the reality of shades of truth. We must struggle to maintain our health without the obsession of the fitness of youth. We need to encourage sympathy and empathy, while shunning the devastation of “attitude”. We learn to put aside the “me first” approach in favor of a sincere desire to share beyond ourselves and out families.

Being an adult simply means that we now know what we should be doing and we move ahead without supervision and do it, even when we really may not feel much like doing it at the time. And so it is and should be in all aspects and areas of our life.

Bob Curtis has been writing articles, short fiction, and poetry for over 30 years. He has been a lay consultant for families and individuals for a number of years. He is currently the managing director of people4people.blogspot.com and is the president of Nexus Publishing, nexus4u.blogspot.com, in Midvale, Utah.

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