PHOTO: Mary van Balen Lord, it is night. The night is for stillness. Let us be still in the presence of God. It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be…
from the New Zealand Prayer Book
After dinner, Dad and I took a walk around the grounds of the nursing facility where he lives, Dad in his wheel chair, me pushing him along. We stopped to wave to a friend who called down to us from her balcony. Dad, always the gentleman, tipped his hat and waved back. Then we were off to the pond. He spotted a couple of geese as we approached and pointed out the “red faces,” muscovy ducks that were settled along the walk that circles the water. Excited by our arrival, the large ducks heaved themselves up with tails wobbling and crowded around us. When they discovered we had come empty handed, they settled back into the grass like lawn ornaments.
Dad pointed out the Canada geese and their fuzzy goslings pulling up grass on the other side of the pond. We headed that way. I remembered four goslings from our last walk. Perhaps the coyotes that live in the woods and surrounding fields had taken two. Last year none survived. One of the adults arched his neck down to the water, took a gulp, and then stretched out his long neck straight up, pointing his bill to the sky. I could see the dark feathers move as the water moved beneath them. The goslings watched, and as children will do, imitated their parents.
“Would you like to sit and watch for a while?” I asked.
“That would be nice,” dad answered, so parked his wheelchair beside the bench and we sat, holding hands and watching the evening come. I saw a frog swimming to shore. I tried to show dad, pointing and then walking toward the frog until I was too close for comfort and it jumped back into the water.
“Did you see him jump, Dad?”
No, dad had eyes only for the geese and the “red faces,” things big enough for him to see. So we sat. I watched the frog make its way back to the bank. Big goldfish (are they Koi?) swam along the shallows and occasionally an orange fin or open mouth broke through the surface. A dragon fly skimmed the water’s surface and a few birds circled one last time from tree to tree. With a flutter of wings, a group of mallards who had been sitting together on the grass to our left rose as one and flapped their way past us. Dad saw that.
He kept his eye on the geese and goslings as they waddled their way around the walk. The light slowly faded. Bugs became a nuisance. The moon rose above clouds that had threatened rain off and on all day.
We sat holding hands, thinking our own thoughts, content to do nothing more or less than join the other creatures and witness the slow deepening of evening as it crept toward night: Our silent night prayer, Compline.
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