Sadie and Seymour

“You are not going to evict Sadie and Seymour.” Hal sputtered, jabbing his lit cigar at Franklin. The heavy ash plopped onto his polished cherry wood desk. Franklin resisted the urge to rebuke Hal and with a swipe of his hand, brushed the ashes to the floor.

“Hal, be reasonable. You can’t subsidize them forever.” Franklin said.

“You’re my lawyer and you have to do as I say. You have to put a provision in the contract for Sadie and Seymour and their brood.”

Franklin sighed. “But they only come here twice a year.”

Hal stood up and walked to the door. He turned and said. “If you don’t do this, the deal is off.” He slammed the door behind him.

Franklin hated to let a million-dollar deal go down the drain. He shouted after Hal. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll talk to the buyer.”

Hal Traynor had lived and worked his potato farm, on the east end of Long Island, for fifty years until the limitations of age forced him to give up farming. He let the fields go fallow. A horse breeder named Sherman Tyne knocked on the old farm house door one day.

“What can I do for you?” Hal said.

“I see your fields lay idle. Would you consider renting them to me for my horses?” Sherman said.

And so they struck an agreement. Sherman fenced the land making three ample fields. He grazed his mares in the corals until they became ready to breed. Then he moved them to his breeding farm four miles away. Hal and his lovely wife Bonnie enjoyed their senior years as country folk watching the horses, tending their small garden and stocking their large pond with water fowl, mostly ducks and a few white geese.

The farmers around them, their neighbors and friends, one by one, sold their land to out of town developers and moved to retirement homes. A local developer badgered Hal for years to sell his farm. The developer wanted to split it into individual parcels. Hal stubbornly refused.

“This land is my life, and I won’t sell.”

Meanwhile, a thousand miles to the north, Canadian geese prepared for their long journey from Canada to Mexico. They stretched their long black necks, flapped their wings and took off into the morning sky forming a perfect vee, honking their goodbyes to cold Canada.

Every year, the geese touched down on the pond at Hal’s place in Setauket, Long Island, to rest for a day or two, before resuming their migration. When Bonnie got sick three years ago, for reasons unknown, two of the Canadian geese stayed on Hal’s farm through the winter. Hal fed the geese and named them Sadie and Seymour.  Each morning the geese waddled up to the back door and tapped on the glass with their beaks to be fed. Then Hal got breakfast for Bonnie, and also for Sadie, and Seymour. In the spring two young goslings emerged, following their parents around on spindly rapid feet. Bonnie clapped her hands.

“Look Hal, aren’t they adorable? Let me feed them.”

The geese came within three feet of Bonnie as she coaxed them to feed from her hand. Finally Seymour ventured to take a chance, grabbed the bread from Bonnie’s hand, and quickly backed away. Through the summer, Bonnie grew weaker. Feeding the geese and watching the goslings grow became her biggest joy of the day.

….to be continued