{bird park}

I live in my favourite place: on the edge of the middle of the city, by the lake, in a cute little neighbourhood full of young families in wartime houses. If I feel like I need tall buildings and car horns and streetlights, I walk out my front door and turn right. If I feel like I need spindly trees and narrow dirt paths and water to skip rocks into, I walk out my front door and turn left. I've never been strictly one person or the other person. I like dirt, but I need pavement too.

Yesterday, because we hadn't in a while and because the weather was so peppy and because it's just a good thing to do, Becky came over and went left with me.

We found this little bird park across the lake from my house. It looked all peaceful and cute, so we went in to look around. We took some pictures and walked across a little bridge and I thought, "Wow. What a great park. You could propose to someone in this park. You could take your kids for a picnic in this park. You could lay down on a pile of bird feathers and just drift off to sleep in this park."

No.

The little bird park turned out to be the scariest place in the world because the geese who live there aren't messing around. They're trying to start a family and they think you're going to mess it up for them and they want to peck your eyes out preemptively so you can't find their stupid eggs.

Fear, you guys, fear is a 20 pound Canada Goose coming at you hissing like a cobra with its wings all open and its beak flashing sharp and dagger-like in the sunlight.

We tried to be brave, but mostly we just hid behind trees and yelled things like, "No. Goose. GOOSE. GOOSE! NO!" and "I PROMISE I DON'T WANT YOUR STUPID EGGS." Then we took a couple of pictures because even though it was pretty life-threatening it was still gorgeous (which, by the way, I think, was really very indomitable of us) and got the heck out of there.

So I guess the moral of the story is: don't propose to your girlfriend in a bird park. Don't take your kids to a bird park. And for Pete's sake, don't sleep there either. Unless you want to die.