Geese, childhood friends. When i was a child I fell in love with two books: the Little Prince by Saint Exupéry and Dialogues with The Wild Goose by Kondrad Lorenz. I felt closer to the blond prince for the naive, eccentric, poetic ability to relate to the animate and inanimate world and felt almost a relative of Saint Exupéry as daughter of aviators. He seemed to me a kind of relative from which my parents must have necessarily inherited the passion for flying. Of Kondrad Lorenz instead I loved the reassuring body and that way of dressing that was familiar to me: rubber boots and raincoats. My mom used to dress like that on rainy days, entering the house with red cheeks saying ” the air is so brisk today!” As if it were the most beautiful thing in the world. My mom looks so british 🙂 In short, even Kondrad, was family to me, austrian by birth but British in manners. During the long days of childhood (oh, blessed the dilated time of childhood) I opened the heavy tome and dreamed to make me follow from the geese. I also wanted to pet them, I wanted to sleep with them. So I learned that geese are smart, can recognize and love familiar humans and be wary of strangers, and if they are in a bad mood is better to stay away, I have learned habits, that they love to graze and are very curious, that they are animals of a scenic and rare beauty.
Now that I am grown up, when commitments and bustle make me forget the value of slowness, the geese are always there to remind me of the beautiful endless days of my childhood.
