On the menu: Goose & Dressing

We wanted our porch to fit in. We were conformists like that. We didn’t want the other porches pointing and laughing at our porch, causing his will to plummet, his joists to give way, and his boards to sag from lack of inclusion in the porch gossip sessions, and never getting invited to a porch sleepover. 

Porches are pretty important in the scheme of life and privacy. They’re the place you run to when you get a real phone call and you don’t want four other people acting as teleprompters with sound effects throughout the entire conversation. It’s the place the last ice cream sandwich goes down in secret, and porches make a cheap alternative to a therapy session. You can tell the dog all kinds of junk out there that you would never consider telling another human.  It’s the first impression invited company and uninvited summer Bible peddlers have of you, so for some reason, you want them to believe normal people live on the other side of that door.  You want your porch to, well, look like everyone else’s.

So we put a wreath up. That doesn’t really serve a purpose other than scratching the door and falling off from a hurried slam, but we went with it. We put a pretty welcome mat there. It bothers me a tinge to have people wipe their feet on something you personally picked out for its aesthetic value. But we went with it.

Then came the porch seats – metal when metal was cool, flowered-y pillow ones when that was a thing. We did the porch swing, too, even though the chain broke loose from its anchor and dumped three kids on the ground. Even though a thread in the seam of the seat broke loose, and did an impression of the knock-all-the-dominoes-down-by-touching-only-one thing. It made it around in record time bringing new meaning to the phrase “rip-snorting good time.”  Even though a demonic squirrel heightened his game from stealing all the pecans and chewing up the car’s air conditioning hoses to pulling all the fluff out of the porch swing pillows and creating Alabama snow flurries in June all around the subdivision. We and the porch swing had an era.

Then came the planks you stand on end that say inviting things such as “Roll Tide” and “It is Well with My Chihuahua.” I mean, you just stand them here leaned against the wall like a package someone forgot to bring in? Okay, we rolled with it, although I think ours might be in Cullman now after the April winds. 

Our porch wasn’t going to be the only one with just, you know, poles and a floor and petunias that are so last-year. Literally. Whatever the neighbors bought, we were buying two of.

Until this. So like, who thought of this? Where did this idea come from, and how did it catch on? Somebody apparently spiked the punch at the PTA bizarre, and someone came home with a large resin goose they paid actual money for. Nobody was letting that thing in the house, and so they put it on the porch until the county truck made its rounds. That’s my theory.

But you know, it’s kind of like replacing a commode. You set the old one outside to haul off, except you forget the haul-off part until it becomes more of a fixture on your landscape than it was on your tile floor upstairs. I think that’s what happened with the goose. People just forgot it was there. That’s my theory.

And then it happened. A family member remembered it right before the guests arrived for a church gig or a Christmas party. It wouldn’t fit behind the shower curtain - not with the Big Wheel and the set of crutches already there. There was no time to run it to the car which was moved to the far curb so the guests could use the driveway. So the host did the only sensible thing and put a Christmas sweater and reindeer antlers on it. That’s my theory.

When the neighbors saw it, it caught on like Sundrop at a bass tournament, and resin geese started popping up faster than kudzu on Miracle-Gro. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted. I’m easily swayed by peer pressure like that. But no. I’ve dressed Barbies before. 

While we spent most of our childhood changing clothes on an 11-inch doll (even when our mamas couldn’t get us to change our own), we did it with finesse. Our girls looked pretty good in floral shift skirts and orange heels you would never see again. On the outer edge, we put them in lab coats or windsuits.

They were fashion dolls, but the geese are doomed to don outlandish garb way beyond the fashion realm and into outfits of sheer humiliation, poor souls. Grass skirts, feather boas, ruffled leotards – this is like a glamour shot gone wrong. 

So I’m not doing it. This is far enough for me. But if you want to . . . 

Take a gander at it.