Hatching Goslings

         This story originates in the house in the farm yard of my adolescence.  My mother had not had the privilege of attending school beyond Grade 9, but she was brilliant as a woman on the farm.  One of her areas of expertise was raising geese.

Like many families of eastern European origin, our celebratory meals centred around a goose, rather than the turkey that has become commonplace in today’s North America.  The rule on the farm, was:  if you’re going to eat it, you’re going to raise it.  We bought almost no groceries, but we ate very well; everything was born, nurtured, fed, raised and then slaughtered and prepared for eating by us. 

So, back to the geese.  We always had at least three female geese and one gander.  They had their own room, the goose barn, in the chicken barn.  The goose barn sheltered them from both the elements and the wild predators and helped them to understand that this was their home. Its floor was piled with a foot of loose straw for comfort and warmth.  A stone’s throw from the barn, those geese had a body of water in which to swim and eat.  The straw in the goose barn also made for an easy nest, good for the goose, and good for us.  In the spring of the year, the geese would build their nests in the barn and then would begin to lay eggs, one at a time.  Every day, we would carefully go into the goose barn and gather the eggs that were there and bring them into the house and safety until it was time for the goose to start sitting on the eggs to begin the incubation process. When the goose began to “nest’, sit in her nest, she was given one egg to nurture and sit on.  It was a signal that the incubation process in the house had to start.

We had a 1970s style electric frying pan, which had a heat setting that allowed for very very low heat.  Mom would fetch the eggs from the root cellar where they had been cool but not cold, line the electric frying pan with an old towel and/or old flannel and then carefully put the eggs in there.  She marked the day that she put the eggs to incubate on the calendar.  She brought us kids to the frying pan, showed us what she did and talked to us about it.

“These eggs,” she said, “are going to become goslings in about a month.  But only if you don’t bother them at all.  Don’t touch them, and don’t touch the heat.  If you really want to see what is going on, just ask me and I’ll show you and explain it to you.”

I watched as she turned those eggs every day for the first few days, and then beginning about the fifth day, she would wet her hands and brush them over the top of the eggs.  I remember watching her do that, and she talked to me as she worked.  “You see, Sandra, if I was the goose, I’d be coming out of the water after a swim and my feathers would still be damp from being on the water, so I’m going to wet those eggs just a little bit, just as if I was the goose.”  Then she’d cover the eggs with another flannel or towel, put the lid on the frying pan and carry on about her day.  The next day, at about the same time, she’d wet her hands and carefully turn each egg over, so that the part of the egg that had been on the bottom of the pan would now be at the top.  Each would have been touched with water and her warm hands.  Mom did this meticulously for the entire incubation period, somewhere between 28 and 35 days.  Somewhere around day 28, when turning the egg and dampening it, she would bring it to her ear and listen to it.  As a child, I didn’t understand what she was doing, so I asked her.

“Mom, what are you doing?”

“Listening for the gosling,” she replied.  “Would you like to listen?  She brought the egg close to my ear and I stood very still and listened, but I didn’t hear anything.

“I can’t hear anything.”

“We’ll check again tomorrow.”

You can bet that I was there the next day at “egg turning time”.  And then one day, the reward would come.  She would bring the egg to her ear and smile.  Then she’d signal for me to come over and I would be there in a flash.  She put the egg to my ear and I heard a faint knocking or pecking.  It was the gosling in there, starting to peck at the side of the egg to break the shell and hatch. 

“Now don’t touch those eggs at all, now.  There are goslings in the eggs, but they’re still very weak.  They are pecking at the shells and by pecking at the shells, they are getting a little stronger every day.  They will peck their own way out of the shells when it is time.”  We listened to Mom; goslings are the cutest little birds ever!

One day, she called me over to the frying pan.  “Look,” she said.  I looked, and sure enough, the gosling inside had pecked an opening in the egg.  “Now you let it peck its own way out of there,” she admonished.  "If you don’t let it come out on its own, it won’t be strong enough to live.  It needs to work hard to live. If I hear its pecking getting weaker, we’ll do something else to help.”

I listened to Mom and watched the hatching and learned.  I learned that hard work and adversity is what makes us stronger so that we can rise up and live.  I learned that life is a cycle; there is a time to be born and later, I learned that there is a time to die.  Each is a part of the cycle of life.

One day, she called me to that frying pan.  “This gosling needs help,” she said.  “Listen.”  I stuck my ear to the egg, but didn’t really know what I was listening for, so I didn’t hear anything different.” 

“What’s it supposed to sound like,” I asked?

“It’s weaker than yesterday. We need to help that gosling so that it doesn’t die.”  She listened to the egg again, carefully from every direction.  She pointed to one part of the egg.  “That is where it’s beak is, and I’m going to mark it and that is where I’m going to make the hole.”  She took a pencil and made a pencil mark at that spot.

Using an old pin, very carefully, she poked a very small and very shallow hole in the egg shell. “There,” she pronounced.  Now that gosling will get some air and the air will give it some strength to peck harder.  But don’t make that hole any bigger.  The gosling is still not completely ready to be hatched.  If it leaves the egg now, it still won’t be ready to live and it will die.”  I left that gosling alone.

Sure enough, as my Mom had predicted, withing a week, we had somewhere around five live goslings in that little nest.  My Mom’s watching and thinking about the natural process of incubation in the wild had taught her what to do so that she could hatch five to ten goslings each year.  And I learned about the value of adversity in life.  If you have a little adversity and you work at it, you will become stronger.  If you have too much adversity, it might kill you.  But when you get help in the adversity, then you need to work hard, and you will become very strong. 

Earnest Hemmingway said it well, “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Hemmingway was right.  The world has broken me, and likely will continue to break me.  If I want to continue being a "survivor" of that brokenness, and even go beyond "survivor" to "thriver", I will work hard at healing those places in which I am broken.  If I find myself overwhelmed at the healing process, discouraged, "I just can't do it", then that will be my signal to ask for help.  My goal is to become as strong as diamond at the broken places!