Life Cycle with a Break in the Cycle

To get there, you follow five geese, Canadian geese, their bellies the swift white of things seen from the underside, meant to hide, to disappear into the flat white of sky. There are five of them now, two mated pairs, a lifetime thing, and a single female, who flits back and forth between the couples with nearly exhausting enthusiasm, until one day she lays three eggs and hatches them out alone, and never bothers with the couples again. On June mornings, she takes the goslings swimming, these three yellow fluffs with feet that always seem just a bit bashful, just a little in-turned, the same way my feet are when I ask for something I really want. Dessert, on a night when there’s no dessert in the house. A book so new it isn’t on Thriftbooks yet. To hatch runner ducks with you and let them swim in our bathtub and take showers with me and curl up on my chest, their feathered hearts beating into mine.

The goslings learn to swim in the same pond I did, a dammed creek flooding into the upturned cup of the mountaintop, filling in spring and freezing in winter. For a lifetime, this was the home of my great granduncles, two men who met in World War II and lived together for sixty-eight years before they were able to marry. They hired men to spread sand over the lake in the winter, so that in the thaw, it would drop to the shorebeds and tamp down the knee-deep mud, so that the lake would be friendly, the most proper version of itself. The newt eggs and dragonfly larvae and minnows were buried, the paramecium, euglena, and heliozoa destroyed, the pond made clean, the pond made clear, the pond made so inarguably decent and wholesome that their niece would bring her grandchildren, the only children in their lives, to visit. So that we would wade in, and learn to dive and splash and screech here, our swift white bellies turned to the sky.

We knew this pond in one frame only, the warm tannin-brown of summer. We left at the turn of the seasons, and my granduncles put on their winter coats, flew south to the sharp skylines and bright nights and whistling wind of the city.

In the Central Park Zoo, two male penguins named Roy and Silo adopted an abandoned egg. Huddled against the cold, they took turns passing the egg back and forth, tucking it against the warmth of their bellies, intertwining their necks, vocalizing quietly to one another. When the egg hatched, a velvet-gray girl named Tango, Roy and Silo were shocked. They cooed, hours and hours and hours calling to her in the low hum of their penguin voices, occasionally a higher keen, awe and awe and awe. They had tried before, spent winters passing back and forth cold gray stones stolen from a neighboring enclosure, and, once, a dead fish. Tango cooed back, and this was also something that hadn’t happened before.

When you and I moved to the Lower East Side, I thought of my uncles often. They moved to the city in the ’60s, nearly sixty years before us. Lou was a hairdresser, known for his brightly colored satin shirts and his excellent raisin bread. John was quiet, reserved, the opposite—except in every way that mattered. They almost left, after the ’80s. Spent some time upstate, waiting for it to get easier, for the moment when they felt they could go back. When I was little, Lou told me he loved the city because it was alive. “It isn’t a small thing,” he said.

At the Central Park turtle pond, a goose died from heartbreak after her partner froze to death, trapped in the ice. Heartbreak is a slow killer— Gretel survived for six days in the Cleethorpes Animal Rescue. “We believe she is in mourning,” the rescue wrote. “She seems uninterested in much.” Occasionally, she woke up disconcerted, honking and looking around her enclosure, as though she weren’t alone. On the seventh day, she didn’t wake up. “We like to think of them together,” the rescue wrote.

My uncles died within months of each other. The last time I saw my great granduncle, he was smaller than I remembered, folded into himself, fading already into the khaki walls of a nursing home. When I told him how sorry I was for his loss, he shook his head. Forever was never something they had counted on. At the second funeral, my cousins wore suits. I squeezed into an uncomfortable dress, my first one not from the kids’ section. We sat in a crumpled line through the service, fidgeting, adjusting, tapping our feet. The doors finally opened, loosed us on the world, and we ran all the way back to the pond, left our suits and dresses by the bank, jumped off the bridge in athletic shorts and sports bras. It had been years since my uncles sanded it, and clouds of dirt lifted as we hit the surface.

We were still swimming when the extendeds arrived, relatives we knew as faded photographs and names the grown-ups said in passing. “Laura,” a relative said to my grandmother, looking at us up to our knees in muck, swatting mosquitoes from our arms. “Those children are feral.” My grandmother shrugged.

I met you five years later, at the school my grandmother had graduated from, John and Lou in the audience clapping for the closest thing they had to a daughter. We moved to the city a few months later, found a place only a few blocks from their old apartment, only a few subway stops from Tango the Penguin.     

The pond is mostly muddy now, and the mountaintop mostly empty. For a time, you and I drove up from the city on weekends. To get there, I told you, follow the geese. In the fall, follow the darkest leaves, the flares of color winding through the canyons where the sun sets just a bit earlier. In the spring, follow the salamanders, the newts that are one thing, and then another, and then another. You proposed by the pond, and my first thought was how glad I was we wouldn’t have to wait sixty-eight years.

Earlier this year, Tango found her mate. Her name is Tazuni, and when I walk around the lake with you, I slip rocks into your pocket. 

M. Rose is a writer, sometimes. They spend most of their time outside, or thinking about being outside, or trying to care for the beings outside.

Published January 15 2025