Mommy Life: Lawn goose costumes? What do they mean?

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June 16, 2011 11:55 AM

Lawn goose costumes? What do they mean?

lawn goose poodle skirt.jpg lawn goose raincoat.jpg Until this morning, I had no idea that dressing inanimate geese was a cottage industry. When I lived in the village of Waterford, there was a goose prominently displayed in front of the house as you turned the corner on the way out of town. It was dressed in a different outfit every single day and over the four years I lived there, I never saw an outfit repeated. My thoughts tumbled between "Cute!" and "My goodness! What a weird way to spend money!"

But this morning my old blogger friend Dean Abbot wrote to tell me he's tweaked his format and is going for a once-a-week piece finding humor in daily life. For a sample, he sent me his piece on goose costumes:

Fowl Play Posted on May 9, 2011 by Dean
If you're anything like me, you've had just about enough of geese in costume. These things are turning up everywhere. Drive down the sunniest street in town, and they'll be there. Visit the folks back home and you'll see them skulking around the door. Drop off a casserole for that bereaved neighbor, and they'll be eyeing you from around the corner. Lie quiet in your bed at night, and you can hear them sneaking into the yard.

Such stealth is quite remarkable given they are made of concrete. These lumps of manufactured stone are, in spite of their obvious menace, apparently beloved by thousands. I cannot say precisely what compels people to take a lump of concrete and shape it into the form of a pesky, aggressive fowl then to take that form and dress it up as, say, one of the founding fathers, but I'm pretty sure it's not a healthy impulse.

I mean, anyone who likes having people come to her door and say "Oh look what you've done with your goose!" only to respond, "That's not a goose, silly! That's James Madison" has got something going on that's not altogether normal.

I have begun to suspect that concrete goose enthusiasm has a dark side. The behavior of even the casual goose-dresser confirms my thesis. The concrete goose must secretly be regarded with fear, as a sign of impending destruction. Why else would people feel the need to disguise them as butterflies?

One web site offers to sell you a devil costume for your goose. What greater sign of ambivalence could there be than the fact that some people would rather come home late at night to find Satan standing in their yard than a concrete goose?

No one knows for sure how this fad started, so I will answer the question of its origin by employing a revered research technique used by scholars everywhere. I'm just going to make something up.

Read more at Retrospective

Also, Dean hosts an online radio show - and his latest interview is with another blogging friend Amy Scott of Amy's Humble Musings.

Love,