Behind the Puddle

This morning I am sitting quietly on the patio watching the puddle, and there really isn’t much happening. The Lone Goose is wandering around by itself, as it so often does, and I think Stanley is standing along the edge doing what herons do. No great wildlife moment is unfolding in front of me. They are simply here, doing their daily things while I do mine.

Since learning that Stella and Stanley may be younger herons, I have caught myself thinking differently about their visits. There is a possibility that this puddle has become one of the waypoints they choose along their journey, somewhere they may return to year after year. I know I may never be completely certain that the heron I call Stanley is always Stanley, but I still find myself hoping that someday I will look across this same water and recognize something familiar standing there.

I hope that for the Lone Goose, too. I have no reliable way of identifying it beyond the fact that it is the one goose I regularly notice hanging out alone. As the other geese begin moving on, I wonder whether the Lone Goose might stay through the winter, quietly becoming part of another season at the puddle. Maybe I will know it when I see it, and maybe I won’t.

There is something comforting about realizing that certainty isn’t actually required for any of this to matter. I don’t need Stanley to know that I call him Stanley, and the Lone Goose doesn’t need to understand that I look for it. They don’t have to know anything about me at all. Their presence is enough.

Maybe that matters to me especially because so much of my other world involves questions that aren’t simple. I spend a great deal of time talking with people about the end of life, listening as they consider what matters to them, what they fear, whom they trust, what they hope for, and what they want the people they love to understand. Some of those conversations stay with me after they are over, not because they are mine to carry, but because you cannot spend your days talking honestly about mortality without occasionally being reminded of your own. And then I come outside.

There is no decision waiting for me here. Stanley isn’t asking me what should happen next. The Lone Goose doesn’t need me to find the right words. Neither one needs an explanation for uncertainty, loss, aging, dying, or any of the complicated things humans spend so much time trying to understand. They simply stand beside me in their own way.

Across the fence and on the other side of the water, completely unaware that their ordinary morning might be giving someone else exactly the quiet she needs.

Perhaps that is another kind of companionship we don’t talk about very often. Not everything that helps us carry difficult things has to understand what we are carrying. Not every presence needs to offer advice, reassurance, answers, or even conversation.

Sometimes it is enough to look across the puddle and find something familiar still there.

I hope Stanley comes back next year. I hope there are many more summers when I instinctively look toward the trees because I have learned where the herons like to perch. I hope the Lone Goose surprises me by appearing on cold mornings when most of the puddle has gone quiet for winter.

But those are hopes for another season. Today, they are here. And while I sit with some of life’s heavier questions, they ask absolutely nothing of me. They simply stand beside me.