A few Sundays ago, we conducted what became our very unofficial Great Birdseed Experiment. We filled one feeder with the Walmart birdseed our little neighborhood has always enthusiastically eaten and another with the special birdseed that seemed, at least in theory, like it should have been an upgrade. The birds made their preference quite clear, and the Walmart feeder won by a landslide.
This morning I realized we had reached another interesting part of the experiment. It has taken seven refills of the Walmart birdseed to equal the amount of time that one filling of the special birdseed has lasted. Apparently preference and efficiency are two very different measurements when you are running a bird café.
But the feeders have also been unusually quiet these last few days. Not empty because Brian stopped filling them, and not because there isn’t food waiting for anyone who wants it. The birds simply haven’t been nearly as interested in visiting, and this morning I found myself looking at those nearly abandoned feeders hanging beneath the tree.
Then I looked toward the Puddle.
There wasn’t a crowd of geese wandering through the grass. There wasn’t a heron standing along the shoreline waiting for breakfast. There weren’t little birds covering the feeders or scattering beneath them looking for everything somebody else had dropped.
There was just the Lone Goose.
He stood midway down the Puddle view, almost perfectly framed through the fence, doing what he so often does. Nothing particularly exciting. Nothing that would make most people stop what they were doing to take a photograph. He was simply there.
I think I have spent enough mornings behind this Puddle now to recognize that quiet does not necessarily mean something is missing. The birds haven’t abandoned us because they aren’t emptying the feeders today. The Puddle hasn’t lost its purpose because only one goose showed up this morning. Their lives are changing with the season, food is available in different places, young birds are growing, and the neighborhood beyond our fence is much larger than the little portion I can see.
Presence changes too.
Maybe that is why I noticed the Lone Goose differently this morning. Against all that quiet, his familiar presence felt a little more significant. He wasn’t doing anything for me, of course, and I don’t imagine he has any idea that I have come to recognize him among all the others.
He just showed up.
There are people like that too. They don’t always arrive with something to fix, something to say, or some grand gesture that announces their presence. Sometimes they simply continue to occupy a little piece of the landscape beside us, especially when everything else has become unexpectedly quiet.
Perhaps that is one of the things the Puddle keeps teaching me. A place does not have to be crowded to have value, and neither does a life. Sometimes we notice what has disappeared, and sometimes, if we are paying attention, we notice the ones who still show up.
This morning, there was one.
And somehow, the Lone Goose was enough.
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