What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.
If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.
Did you know that geese in Minnesota are vicious?
We have all been chased off a walking path by a goose protecting its goslings. We also know that a whole gaggle of geese will chase us to protect their babies.
Operation Metro Surge arrived arrived where the children were: at our school bus stops, our grocery store parking lots, and the entrances to our mobile home parks.
And we got protective as geese are about their goslings.
“Oh shit!”
Linda saw them from about thirty yards out. Eight adult Canadian geese, clustered loosely on the grass between the path and the water. And between and behind them, dozens of tiny yellow-brown unsteady goslings bobbled along, bumping into each other and tripping over their own feet.
She thought she was far enough away to wait for them to get into the lake, but she was wrong.
One of the larger adults started hissing, and then lunging, and next thing she knew it was running towards her at full speed, wings out, mouth open, loud honking.
“Shit! Shit! Shit. . . Millie NO!” Linda tugged on the leash, but Millie — a seventy-pound black lab with extensive hunting dog training saw the goose and pulled with every bit of her might towards it.
The goose did not slow down.
When we see a gaggle of Canadian geese with goslings in tow, we apply the same healthy fear we have for black ice and deer on the highway. From April through July, the Canadian geese who come back to our 10,000 lakes every spring are not the docile, bread-accepting birds that people in other states think they are. A gaggle of geese like this is several families who have merged their babies together into one huge group, called a gang brood. Every adult guards every gosling — not just their own.
Linda got a hold of Millie’s collar and stumbled off the paved path onto the grass, and power-walked in the most undignified retreat of her adult life.
“We’re going! We’re GOING!” she said to the goose, as if reasoning with it would help.
It did not help.
The goose escorted them a full twenty yards past what Linda would have considered a reasonable perimeter before it stopped, shook out its wings, honked twice more for good measure, and waddled back to the group like a bouncer returning to the door.
We all know that a mother goose is more ferocious than a black bear with her cubs or a giant moose standing in our backyard, or a wolf eyeing our mini-labradoodle for lunch. We can easily spook the bear, moose, or wolf to run away. But a goose doesn’t spook, especially when it is protecting goslings. It will chase and hiss, and yes, attack.
We aren’t gonna wait around for the attack. We’re the ones that spook and take off.
Linda caught her breath on a bench near the parking lot. Millie sat down and panted, thrilled with the whole experience.
“You are no help,” Linda said to the dog.
She watched from a safe distance as the geese reassembled around the goslings and moved as one body toward and into the water — a slow, wide parade of tiny wobbling fluff surrounded on all sides by adults whose necks swiveled like periscopes.
And we get it, a mother doesn’t wait for permission to protect a baby. When a threat is imminent, every baby belongs to every mother.
When ICE showed up at our school bus stops and our grocery store parking lots and the entrances to our mobile home parks, we did what the geese do.
We didn’t sort the children into mine and not mine. We formed a gang brood. We stood between the babies and the thing that didn’t belong near them, and we made ourselves big, and we made ourselves loud, and we did not bluff.
Nobody assigned us a gosling. We just showed up at the park and started counting heads.
This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.
It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.
If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.
If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month.
Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.
That’s how this works.
That’s how we work.
I love you fiercely,
TeriLeigh 💜
TeriLeigh, the gang brood gives Minnesota a civic memory people can carry long after the policy language fades. A reader can picture adults widening the perimeter around children, and that image preserves how ordinary people understood their obligation to one another while events were unfolding. WOMN is preserving both testimony and the moral vocabulary a community used to decide who belonged inside its circle of care. I appreciate how deliberately you rooted that memory in a creature, a landscape, and a protective instinct Minnesotans immediately recognize.
A story well told. The imagery of fierce geese protecting their goslings is a great analogy. We can then easily picture what the adults did... and why the adults circled up around the children.