Estate planning has become a major industry in modern America. Attorneys, financial advisors and accountants uniformly stress to their clients the importance of having a sound financial plan for the foreseeable future.
Personally, my Good Wife and I have tried to develop a viable package of our assets, and until recently, I thought we had succeeded in covering all the contingencies.
Earlier this month, that thought was challenged when my Good Wife raised a point that we had overlooked, when she asked, “To whom would you leave Gladys?” Initially, I was concerned by her use of the pronoun, “you,” rather than “we,” but upon reflection, I realized that her verbiage was not the focus of her inquiry, which really was about Gladys’s long-term welfare.
Gladys has been with us for over 15 years and the familial bond that exists is basically between her and me. The relationship between Gladys and my Good Wife is by no means toxic, but it is restrained, at least somewhat so, or perhaps reserved is a better word to use. When I am away from home or indisposed, my Good Wife dutifully keeps Gladys well fed and watered, but the bond between them is essentially superficial. In colloquial terms, I should say that there is no love lost between them, principally because there never has been any love to be found between them.
Despite all of her idiosyncrasies, Gladys and I have developed a successful modus vivendi. I have come to accept her lack of gratitude when I serve her meals and I sympathize with the other members of the extended family whom she bosses around, always eating first, and keeping them from the food until she has been satiated.
She normally leaves Henry, the gander, alone, undisturbed while dining, but the chickens have learned that they can eat only when she has finished. Consequently, I feed them in several locations to impede her ability to control their consumption, all of which tends to frustrate her while eating, but I do not think the frustration has caused any digestive problems.
With respect to estate planning, the process is more complicated than merely being a question of who would get Gladys. We also must think of Quack, with whom Gladys has become bonded. She is three times his size, and to this day, I never have been able to define the nature of their relationship, that is, whether it is maternal, romantic, or tutorial.
As far as cotton patch geese are concerned, I consider Gladys to be the standard of that heritage breed. She truly has a majestic presence, quite similar to that of the cotton patch goose depicted on the 2021 commemorative U.S. postal stamp. As the name attests, the breed was developed to keep grass and weeds down in Southern cotton patches.
Quack is a khaki Campbell drake. As with Gladys, he talks incessantly, hence his name, and he follows her every move. His behavior is best defined as being sycophantic, which I am sure is a great boost to Gladys’s ego, not that it needs any enlargement.
I have concluded that their bond is web-footed, which causes them to look down upon the chickens with their three-toed feet, although the chickens are better for scratching than web-footed fowl and geese do not scrounge for food the way chickens do. Geese like to be served.
Come the end of February until the middle of April, my Good Wife becomes more understanding of Gladys, as she creatively uses her large eggs to make a superb cheesecake or a sublime goose egg frittata, each of which would be worthy of a five-star restaurant.
Writing this item, I have come to realize that the situation relative to Gladys’s future status as posed by my Good Wife is not to be solved by penning a new codicil, but rather to follow the advice of the late Bibb Graves, one-time governor of Alabama, namely, “to keep on keeping on.”
Happy New Year!
