The reason I was in Fort Collins is that I’d gone to the sacrament of confession at a church there, and then had prayed for a while afterward, in the nave.

I must tell you, since I was talking about them only a few entries ago, that I saw an astounding number of geese this afternoon, when I was driving back from Fort Collins on a side road that took me past acres of farmland on which thousands of them appeared to be sitting and roosting. I say thousands and I really do mean that. My view of them, from the road, was unobstructed by trees or hedgerows or any other foliage or growth, and the fields themselves looked like they may have been fallow. The geese were spread out across an area at least a half-mile wide, and, in most places, between fifty and a hundred yards deep. It was an amazing sight, in my estimation. Had someone been in the vehicle with me I would have exclaimed to them aloud.

I can’t decide whether I’ve kept this desk, all this time, from sentimentality or practicality. Though I’d never choose to give it up at this point, anyway, even if to keep it would seem impractical.

One of the stickers is a black teddy bear with the acronym “D.A.R.E” emblazoned in red across its chest. And then, in very small print beneath those letters, “to keep kids off drugs”. It is faded now, and peeling around the edges, and I imagine it must have been distributed during an education or awareness program when whichever one of my sisters who stuck it there was in elementary or middle school.

The desk is very small, and in fact belonged to my younger sisters when we were children and were growing up together. I mean that they shared it, or handed it down, one to another, during our school years, before it came into my possession after I graduated college. I’ve kept it somehow for almost twenty-five years. It still has, stuck on its wood, stickers that my sisters must have put there when they were kids.

I’m sitting this morning at a desk at a window in a room in our house that A. and I refer to as the office, though the room does not really have the feeling of an office to me. It is still rather empty, because we haven’t fully moved into this house, and may never fully move in, who knows?

I’ll watch them for a moment then, floating on the water, before doing whatever calisthenics I’ve come there to do.

In the cold months now, in Queens, when I jog down to the water in A.’s and my neighborhood, and I’m standing there on the pier breathing heavy and trying to catch my breath, I’ll sometimes see a few of them come in at an angle, from the sky, for a landing on the East River.

I know they are somewhat ordinary, insofar as they are not uncommon in many parts of this country, but I do like them anyway. To me no bird is more interesting to watch, when it is in the air, flying, than the Canada goose.

Once, several years ago, when I lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side and would jog early mornings in the park, a flock of these same geese flew very low over my head in the pre-dawn light as I rounded the arc at the top of the Great Lawn. I remember looking up and hearing their wingbeats in the air, and experiencing a special kind of amazement.

As I passed a cemetery not far from our house, I saw five or six Canadian geese grazing among the tombstones and grave markers that are nearest to the road. They were so quiet that I wouldn’t have noticed them had I not chosen, at that moment, to look in the direction where they were. All I could hear was the crunching of snow beneath my sneakers, and now and then the engine of a vehicle from another street.

This morning, after lifting a pair of dumbbells I keep in the house out here, for the sake of exercise, I went jogging on the snowy roads and in the bright sunlight in our neighborhood, wearing a sweatshirt at first but then removing it about halfway through the jog, because the weather was so pleasant and mild.

That tilma belonged, of course, to the wonderful Saint Juan Diego, the indigenous Mexican peasant to whom Our Lady appeared, on Tepeyac Hill.

We then went on to talk about the image of Our Lady that, in 1531, appeared on the famous tilma, or cloak, of Guadalupe, because that image is a kind of Marian equivalent, visually speaking, of the Shroud of Turin, though the analogy is imperfect, and not meant by me to be exact.

That association being the one that exists between Our Lady, or Mary, or simply the mother of Jesus, if you prefer not to use honorifics, and Jesus himself, as he pertains to the man of the shroud, or, more precisely, the image of the man of the shroud.

The woman had made an association, in other words, mentally speaking, and had moved the conversation forward in a way that seemed to her natural, and logical, and that in fact was natural and logical, even if there was a kind of abstraction one needed to intuit, and follow, in order to grasp her association and incorporate it into the shape that the conversation had been assuming in one’s mind.

I should say that the reason that subject had come up at all is because the woman had thought to mention it after I’d told her and the man that I was a writer, after one of them had asked what I did for work, and that the book I was working on now is about Our Lady, or anyway was meant to have been about Our Lady when I’d started it, though now it was as much about art, and books, and movies, and the minutia of my life, as it is about Mary.

At first, when I’d gotten there, we’d sat on chairs in the parlor, drinking diet soda and talking. Then, after a while, we’d stood and had moved into the dining room, where places had been set and where the woman showed me where I ought to sit. While we were eating we talked about many subjects, one of which happened to be the Shroud of Turin, because the woman had seen a documentary about it, or had listened to a podcast on it, only a day or two prior.

Lunch went well yesterday. We ate lasagna with fresh salad and crusty garlic bread. For dessert the woman had made apple strudel, which she served with ice cream. When I was leaving she gave me a dozen eggs to take with me. These were eggs that her hens had laid. I forgot to mention that these neighbors of mine have a chicken coop in their back yard.

Today, around midday, I’m supposed to go over to the neighbors’ house for lunch, because they invited me to do so, on this day, when I stopped by to pick up A.’s and my mail a couple days ago. I hope I won’t be awkward while I’m with them. I’m not used to having lunch with people I know, let alone with people I’ve only recently met, though of course these two particular people seem to me very nice and charming, and in fact I’m worried only about the impression I will make on them, not the impression they will make on me. They are a little older than A. and I, maybe ten years older, so they are more or less of the same generation as us, though they still seem to me more adult, more capable, and more sophisticated. The woman is from South Africa, and the man is from here but has traveled extensively for his work, which is, as I understand it, structural engineering.