The local junior college is only a mile or two from my house, and I often drive by it. It has a well-manicured campus, with walking trails and lush green lawns, and a mid-sized pond tucked towards the back, at the bottom of a hill, a few yards away from a thick copse of pine trees. My favorite part of the pond is the small flock of grey, white and black geese, and the one ugly duck that hangs with them.
"My" geese look like this:
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I don’t like white geese very much. The wild geese I see around ponds tend to leave people alone, but white geese can be vicious. Growing up, my family lived in Taiwan for a couple of years. To get to the adjoining neighborhood where some of my friends lived, I had to cut through a little village, made of huts, guarded by geese. I was only in fourth grade. They scared me to death, hissing and chasing me. In what I will always remember as a genuine act of kindness, an older woman who lived in the village stopped me one day and handed me a stick. Even though we didn’t speak each other’s language, she was able to show me how to use the stick to ward off the geese. I still was terrified of them.
But “my” local geese calmly trek from the copse of trees to the pond and back without bothering anyone. When the weather is bad—wet or terribly hot—they are hunkered down in their nests out of sight. When the weather is fair, you can find them hanging around or in the pond. Not only are “my” geese friendly; they are also picturesque.
I tried to imagine what they might talk about around their geese campfires in the woods when the weather keeps them out of the pond. Maybe they tell stories about their ancestors, who would fly thousands of miles from somewhere up North to somewhere in the far South, until one brave ancestor finally said, “Enough! The land here is gracious, the weather relatively mild, and I’m sick of flying all the time.” And then perhaps they share stories about the other brave ancestors who carved out a place for them in their home pond and the copse of woods.
While I’m not sure how the geese view stories, story-telling is an important part of being human. Our minds frame most of what we do as a story. Stories are how we explain to others who we are and how we see things. The problem with the stories we tell about ourselves is that they are told from only one point of view—the individual’s. Sitting in a crowded restaurant on a Friday night having dinner with my husband, I will have one story about the evening, while my husband will have a different one.
And that’s why what we do as writers is so important. When we spin our tales, we aren’t telling the story from our point of view. We get inside other people’s heads and show our readers what it’s like to be our main character for a little while, to experience their sorrows and joys and points of view. Whether our work is a gritty detective crime story from 1950s LA or a cozy mystery set on the Georgia coast, it gives the reader a little taste of what it might be like to be someone else, for just a little while, broadening their horizons.
Do you have a favorite character in your writing repertoire whose stories you enjoy sharing with others?
