Goose Lake critter report

BULLETIN: Greg Brock posted on Facebook today the original cast of SOMEBODY CATCH MY HOMEWORK, the play Sandy Asher wrote inspired by my poetry. Thanks Greg! For anyone interested, here’s a link to when the play came out in 2004. http://www.dramaticpublishing.com/p1411/Somebody-Catch-My-Homework/product_info.html

Hi everyone,

In the past seventy-two hours I’ve been entertained by our wild neighbors all around us. I snapped this shot through my car window of nine turkeys half a block from our house. Throw in a pair of does, a crow chasing an owl ten feet over my head, and another crow that landed in one of our trees and made low, sad noises that sounded like mourning or some other kind of distress.

Just at dusk one evening I spotted a slender dark object in the water just off our yard. I walked down the steps for a closer look, phone camera in hand. The object suddenly came alive, turned my way and made a splashing lunge right to the water’s edge at my feet before twisting back into deeper water and disappearing. It was one of those enormous fish at least three feet long that I think is some kind of carp. We counted nine of them one evening not long ago. I missed the close-up shot and was left standing in the twilight staring into dark water and wishing I could see below that surface.

If I go on at times about Goose Lake, it’s because such encounters feed me. They always have. For as long as I can recall I have thrilled to the sounds and sights of members of other worlds that whirl about us in their own orbits which, now and then, intersect with ours. Especially if we listen and look. If anything informs my thinking and subsequently my writing, this is it. I can’t match the bears and mountain lions I’ve seen posted lately, but I’m plenty happy here in southwest Missouri.