Basket Case

Beware of Easter bunnies – and babies – bearing gifts

By Jane Borden

In spite of enjoying idyllic Easter traditions in my youth — picking flowers from our yard for the wire-mesh cross at First Presbyterian Church, hunting for marshmallow candies inside tulip blooms in my great aunt’s storybook garden — my strongest memory of the holiday is the time I dressed as the Easter Bunny to work a party for 3-year-olds.  

It was a sweet gig. At 13, I was a regular babysitter for a couple of the children  invited, so my audience members were already my fans. Plus, there’d be candy. My parents dropped me on the other side of Dogwood Park, where I climbed inside a polyester, adult-sized rabbit, and attached the bug-eyed helmet. Then I sauntered into the mêlée, basket of candy in hand, adopting my best congenial walk. Just your average steroidal Lepus, looking for fun and eager to hug. Everybody get psyched.  

The first child who saw me started to cry immediately. Within seconds, they were all screaming, abandoning their hunts to help spread the warning to neighboring villages: A monster conjured from the unknown had come to wave its hairy paws at them and dance a jig. “Regard its tapping foot! Its unnatural cotton tail!! Why does the beast present its behind?! Only heaven can save us now.”  

Thirty seconds after affixing the costume’s head, I removed it. Then, commenced a new terror. “The monster is my babysitter! The monster is my babysitter? Clearly, I have never noticed my babysitter’s behind!!”  

Every moment in early childhood, because we are born clean slates, is unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Reality is sudden, overwhelming, occasionally horrifying and confounding to pick apart. Then enters a creature breaking the rules their brains have so struggled to grasp. It resembles a stuffed toy but possesses free will. It has dead eyes, but sees. It was not invited.  

Still, heartbreakingly, the children were torn. Though wailing, they did not run — because this half-beast babysitting specter bore sweets. Candy is the closest thing toddlers have to religion. Like grace, it is perfect, rare and delivered by gods. Was this polyester monster the deity their parents addressed before meals? Certainly, each meal ended with sweets.  

In the end, though, the basket of treats could not calm. They dropped even the candies they’d already collected, and with good logic. What if the foil wrapped chocolate rabbits in their hands began to speak and dance as well? They could suffer no more unexplained wagging behinds.  

But slowly the children understood and accepted that they were safe, and that I was still me but in strange clothes. We exchanged belated hugs. I babysat often. Usually, this involved feeding kids boxed macaroni and cheese, playing games, and putting them to sleep not long after I had arrived. Afterward, there were hours to kill. So you could say I was babysitting or you could say I was eating cheese. Every fridge contained the string variety, and usually Kraft slices too. I also ate the leftover mac and cheese, as well as small portions of pretty much everything in the refrigerator and pantry. As long as there was enough for my portion to go unnoticed, I partook. It was the prepubescent equivalent of swiping a bit of liquor out of each bottle of your parents’ cabinet. But I also did the dishes, always, in a desperate ploy to stay employed. I tidied toys and wiped counters. Then I watched television until the adults returned to drive me home. My mom instructed that I never count wages upon receiving them, so I stuffed the  wads and checks in my pocket, pulling them out as soon I crossed my parents’ threshold. Sixteen  dollars, fist-pump to the sky! And that was a raise. When I started at 12, I charged $2.50 an hour. I had taken a babysitting class at Cone Hospital, so I deserved every penny. 

Babies watching babies. The kids liked me be cause I was one of them. When I texted Nancy May — who co-organized that egg hunt — to ask what she remembered about the day, she said, “I also got a lot of special grown-up candy for you. But your mom told me afterwards that you were disappointed not to get the same kind the kids had on the hunt, so I  brought some of that over to your house later.” 

At some point, presumably during my twelve years in New York, I forgot how to be with children. This, in spite of a diet still filled with children’s candy. Now, I’m relearning. The reality of having my own is not at all the way I had imagined it would be. You think it’ll be hard. Or, at least, people tell me that a lot — “It must be hard.” They say it because they can’t imagine, don’t know what to expect. But parenthood isn’t hard, per se. It’s just a new reality. And there is definitely a long transition into understanding how this reality works. The transition itself is difficult, absolutely. But the reality? I can’t say if it’s hard or easy. It just is. 

So, parents out there, take a moment to imagine a scenario. You have just had your first child and are in the middle of that harrowing transition, still coming to grips with what the phrase constant care actually means. You are leaning over a crib at 3 a.m., wiping poop off its railings, struggling with a squirming and crying infant, when out of nowhere, an elephant-sized baby saunters into the nursery, waving its big-baby hands and doing a little jig. What would you do? Even if it came bearing an oversized basket full of what, at the moment, are your favorite things – wine, a hot meal, sleep – it’s a basket full of sleep. I don’t care how much you want it, you scream.

You can find Greensboro native Jane Borden, author of I Totally Meant To Do That, in L.A. now — or at JaneBorden.com or via twitter.com/JaneBorden.

Canada Goose

How the northern waterfowl became a permanent resident of North Carolina 

By Susan Campbell

The Canada goose: For some the  image is a magnificent and noble bird of the North. For others it is a noisy, messy nuisance that just won’t go away.  In recent years it seems people either love or hate Canadas. (And about that adjective: Although the “Canada” goose is not about to undergo a name change, I can assure you that  the vast majority of the birds you see are actually made in America.) When I was a lot younger, flocks of these majestic birds signified the changing of the seasons. I would hear the distant unmistakable honking and search the sky for skeins of birds moving on their annual journey. But times have changed. I challenge you to find a municipality along  the Eastern Seaboard where the birds cannot be found twelve months of the year. 

Regardless of their origin, Canada geese are definitely legal aliens and are the second largest of the waterfowl found in North Carolina, with tundra swans a good 30 percent larger and up to half again as heavy. Tundras are only here from late October into early March and are not seen in the Piedmont. However, it’s well worth the journey to see them blanketing the large lakes and sounds of the coastal plain. Canada geese, although only found here and there in our mountains, are now permanent residents in the rest of the state year round. And their large, nonmigratory population continues to grow even in urban areas.  

Canada geese are almost unmistakable, with their light brown back and chest, white bellies, black legs and a distinctive white chin strap that contrasts with their black bill, head and neck. Other geese such as greater white-fronted or the domesticated greylag will be tan all over and sport pinkish orange bills, legs and feet.  

Don’t, however, be tempted to take the ever-present flocks of Canada Geese for granted. It’s not unusual for a migrating wanderer — a passing greater white-front ed goose or a snow goose — to be attracted to the feeding or loafing flock. Or on  occasion, the smallest subspecies of Canada, the cackling goose (about as big as a  mallard), will join the group. Historically Canada geese overwintered in Eastern North Carolina’s extensive areas of large, open water. Lake Mattamuskeet tended to be the area with the largest concentrations. The shallow freshwater lake with  abundant submerged aquatic vegetation as well as acres of adjacent agricultural land, often planted in corn, provided optimal habitat. In fact, the original National Wildlife Refuge logo there once included the Canada goose.  

Another inland became a seasonal goose magnet, as well: Gaddy’s Goose Pond (in Anson County). Lockhart Gaddy, a big-time goose hunter, was lucky enough to attract a few passing birds to a large pond on his property during the mid-1930s. Then he began managing intensively for wintering waterfowl and succeeded in hosting as many as 10,000 Canadas by the 1950s.  

As the interest in goose hunting grew in the 1960s and ’70s in the Eastern  United States, others to the north followed Gaddy’s lead: especially around the Chesapeake Bay. With plentiful food and good habitat at hand, not surprisingly, more and more Canada geese abandoned the long flight home to Canada and  began spending the summer — and winter — farther South, thousands in North Carolina. Wild flocks do show up still, but their numbers are dwarfed by the omnipresent native population. Also, many of the nonmigratory geese we see are  the offspring of hand-reared birds that were released decades ago so they could be hunted. However, they had no parents to show them the way either north or south from here thus; they never leave. So what if the length of days and nights confuses them? They’re not about to leave environs of the golf courses, riverbanks  and reservoirs where they were hatched. 

As the first southerly breezes of spring begin to blow, large flocks of migrant  Canada geese will begin to head north. Their loud honking will give them away  as they pass high overhead on their way back to nesting grounds in the boreal forests, north of the border and beyond. But not to worry, their relatives are here to stay.  

Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by  email at susan@ncaves.com.