Here:

You know how kids today seem jaded by all the special effects in movies, the kinetic lure of the internet, the manic mannered jerky pace of indistinguishable cartoons, and all the other things that tweezer out some ancient human sense of wonder and replace it with studied indifference and an appetite for something else to fill the void? Yeah, that. Well, while cleaning the kitchen table a few hours before The Meal I heard a great squabble outside; I opened the door, wondered if some kids up the block weren’t making silly sounds in the newly-fallen snow. The voices were coming from above. It took a few seconds to parse the babble and realize that these were geese. I’d never heard so many geese together at once. But where were they? The sky was empty. They’d passed already, I thought.

You never think of geese as having a gift for song; they honk, they squonk, they bleat and bark and shout out the same nasal, peevish, hectoring note. Unlovely, but it has a certain appeal. You hear it in the fall; you pause and stop raking. You look up and wish them well and feel the old melancholy pang. Time has passed. However many hours and minutes and seconds we invent to split up the year, there are only two strokes of the hands, really. The first robin and the last goose.

As I said, I couldn’t see them. I figured they’d already passed - but why are they getting louder? Perhaps they’ve -

And then the geese appeared over the trees in numbers I’d never beheld before. A great ragged V ran a mile one way and a mile in the other, intersected in a dozen points by smaller groups, more wedges tucked in behind and between and beyond, and I’ll be damned if every one of them wasn’t singing. It was the most astonishing sound. Add enough geese, and you finally hear the melody. Called the children – the media-saturated Nintendo-generation – and bade them to rush out and look up. Their jaws dropped and their eyes shone and they stood as still as stone until the last bird passed over our house, and the sound of their song was lost to our ears. I will remember that all the days of my life.