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snow was awesome when i finally got some in my life, and i still think of it that way. we had something like 20 inches a few weeks ago, and about 9 or 10 the other day. i sometimes make a snowday project of walking out to the huge cemetery a few miles from here. the place is always beautiful to me but it is something else when covered like that. the burials go on anyway, and the mounds of tan-colored dirt look (even more than usual) like piles of shit. after a monster blizzard a couple of years ago i walked out there, to a certain spot that i like to check in on any time i go. it is at a high spot in the yard, not the highest spot but higher than most of the rest of the place. i climbed the stairs and saw several piles of what i thought was dog shit. i thought wow, that's a lot of dogs that got up here during the blizzard. i stepped about 10 paces forward and discovered i was standing in a field of shit. the turds spread as far in front of me as i could see, the stuff seeming to have completely covered the walkway at the top of the staircase. my shoes were covered with shit, and all i could think to do was go back the way i came in, stepping into my footprints so as not to squish any more shit than i already did. my fancyass $260 mbt shoes were completely soaked and i had to throw the shit-stained things away. thinking it was dog shit i tried to imagine how so much of it got into this place. did the groundskeeperes bring in truckloads of dog shit for some reason? to fertilize the ground? that didn't make any sense. nothing about the scenario made much sense to me until i remembered the geese, those surprisingly large canadaian geese that huddle in huge masses around the cemetery, and in other parts of the city. these are the type of geese that slammed into the airplane (piloted by captain sullenberger) which made the miracle landing in the hudson river. those geese are big animals. a wire story about the hudson rive plane-landing incident described the "bird strike" that hit the plane. the writer said these geese could potentially grow to the size of a 10-year-old child, which produced some amusing images in my mind of a mass of gradeschoolers leaping from school playground into the paths of airplanes taking off. my theory about the field of shit at the cemetery is that hundreds of the geese which populate the grounds must have huddled together during the blizzard, which lasted over 24 hours, and during that time they dropped 24-hours worth of goose shit. i can't know for certain if that is how the field of shit came to be but i don't mind believing it. |
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