Ducks, Geese and Daffodils

Ducks, geese and daffodils each have their own special meanings to me. Growing up on a grain farm in the middle of a sometimes unruly lot of siblings, our parents tried desperately to show us a more orderly way of life. I knew nothing of the financial struggle of raising nine children and suspect it would only have been boring. But, when my dad told us his story of the first day of hunting season growing up in the United States, it was anything but boring. Not because I was interested in hunting, but because of the excitement stirred by the men gathering, dogs barking, guns cleaned and oiled. Personally, I don’t care for guns at all but it was my dad’s storied experience so it was good. On our prairie farm, on the occasions when dad was free from field work, he did go hunting. Was there an echo of that youthful excitement? I would like to think so. On a successful hunt, he did bring home ducks, pheasants and, I think, quail - never geese, but that’s another story. Very young at the time I do not recall all the unpleasantness of the plucking and butchering, nor do I remember the taste of the meat or how my mother cooked it. One vague memory is that the duck meat was dry, quail and pheasant didn’t have much meat on them. The story of the geese is two fold. My dad loved the sound and flight of geese in the fall. But as an eating bird, they were ‘too greasy’. One fall, he and my stepmother were visiting me in Texas. I was in my bedroom when I heard him excitedly calling my name ‘Suzie! Suzie! Get out here!” I rushed to the sound of his voice - he was in the back yard looking up at the sky as a low flying flock of geese winged over my neighborhood. There was that same excitement  in his voice. It drew me then as an adult as it had in our farmhouse on the Saskatchewan prairies. Years later, when my dad was gone from this earth, I visited my sons in Victoria, B.C. The first time I saw the amazing swaths of daffodils cascading down a slope across the road from the Dallas Road dog park, I felt what I believe my dad felt at the opening of hunting season: joy and delight. Would he use those words?  I really doubt that, but in my girly mind they fit. 

In a few more years, I would be walking regularly with a new group of friends or with my sons and their dogs. I have returned home to live on the prairies, missing not only my good friends but the swaths of daffodils and the shyer ones that peek out from the bushes along the Dallas Road. The brazen geese and more sedate ducks have returned to the waters of the Wascana lake. When I hear the geese honking, ducks quacking or the whoosh of their wings taking flight, I hear my dad calling me to come outside.

“We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. 

There isn’t a stronger connection between people than story telling.”

~ Jimmy Neil Smith, Director of the International Storytelling Center