SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There's a trend taking flight across America right now - well, taking flight again.
STEPHANIE ZAWADA: My porch goose is on the front porch. It's white. It has a green base. It has a little yellow beak.
SIMON: That's Stephanie Zawada (ph) of Western Springs, Illinois. She's one of a growing flock of people with life-size statues of geese, often cast of concrete, on their porch or in their garden. Porch geese aren't new - they've graced stoops for decades. But Zawada's is new. Hers is plastic. She got it online a few months ago and hasn't decided on the name yet because she's been busy styling it.
ZAWADA: I ordered a cute little gardening outfit for it. So it's wearing a pair of overalls and a striped shirt and a little straw hat, and then it's holding a trowel and a flower pot in the other hand. And my neighbor, who has a porch goose as well, graciously gifted me a few outfits - a pumpkin for Halloween, a Hawaiian shirt with a lei and a straw hat. And then my favorite - it's a red polka-dot bikini, two-piece, with red heart-shaped sunglasses.
SIMON: She's hoping her goose turns heads this summer.
ZAWADA: I want my neighbors to walk past my house and be like, oh, her flowers are so pretty and her goose's outfit is so cute and funny - you know, just a fun, neighborly thing to do.
JEREMIAH HINES: With how the economy has been trending and how politics have been trending, it seems that people are wanting to just have a bit of whimsy in their lives, and it seems like the porch goose is kind of addressing that issue.
SIMON: Jeremiah Hines works at Harper's Statuary & Water Gardens in Rockingham County, Virginia, where porch geese are flying off the shelves.
HINES: It used to be, at one time, like, we were lucky if we even sold 10 porch geese in the calendar year. Last year alone, we sold approximately 40 in one year. And then this year, we've already surpassed selling 40 of them.
KATE MORGAN: Stores are definitely selling more porch geese - both smaller local stores, and some major retailers are getting in on the action, too.
SIMON: Kate Morgan is on the goose beat. For a recent piece in The Washington Post, she delved into dedicated social media groups that have as many as a quarter of a million members.
MORGAN: There is an entire economy surrounding porch geese and porch goose attire. Within these social media groups, there are lots of people who are making different outfits and taking custom orders, and everyone from middle-aged women to college students who are trying to pay their tuition by selling clothes for geese.
SIMON: Kate Morgan says nostalgic millennials are the wind beneath the wings of the current porch geese craze.
MORGAN: They recall their grandmothers and their aunts dressing up their porch geese in the '80s and '90s. And in some cases, you know, there are some porch geese from even further back than that.
SIMON: But why a goose in the first place?
MORGAN: Geese do not back down from a fight, as anyone who's ever tried to walk past a nesting goose in a park can probably attest. Pliny the Elder writes about a flock of geese that saved ancient Rome. The Gauls were attacking in the middle of the night, and they were being really sneaky, but turns out, you can't sneak up on a goose. And this flock of goose honked and shrieked, and the Romans woke up and protected the city.
SIMON: Live in an apartment or just don't have a porch? Well, some stores sell desk geese that you can dress up - maybe as BJ Leiderman, who does our theme music.
MORGAN: It's an outward symbol of who you are, and it makes people smile.
SIMON: And maybe in 40 years, we'll all smile at a resurgence of live, laugh, love signs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SURPRISE CHEF'S "DANGEROUS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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