Growing up right by a lake, my family didn’t settle for ordinary pets like cats and dogs. Instead we favored ducks and geese. Every spring, I’d order fertilized eggs online, usually from ebay, and put them in an incubator in my room. I tended to the eggs daily, rotating them every six hours, misting them with water to keep them humid, and after roughly 30 days they would finally hatch. It usually took around two days for a gosling to fully emerge from their shell after the hatching process began; I would always like to be there toward the end so I would be the first face the goslings saw. By doing this I was able to get the goslings to imprint on me, making them believe I was their mother. They followed me everywhere–waddling across the yard, swimming in a line behind me, and even tapping on the front door with their beaks when I went inside. Eventually I bought them all diapers so that they actually could follow me indoors. When the geese grew older, I released them onto the lake. Every evening, my dad and I would haul a 35lb bag of bird food down to the lakeshore, and like clock work all the geese I had ever raised would return back to my house for dinner. Sometimes, our geese brought along others, turning our little feeding ritual into a gathering of dozens, sometimes over a hundred. Watching the geese come back every evening showed me that no matter where life takes you, you can always find your way back home. As I’ve left for college, it’s a comforting reminder that home will always be a part of me, no matter how far I go.