Another Day in the Country
Getting my ducks in a row
© Another Day in the Country
It’s been a quiet week in Ramona, my home town, except on the corner of 5th and D Sts., where we stirred things up by painting the porch.
Twenty-some years ago, when we finished building this house, my mom was the age I am now — wishing she could do more to help. So she volunteered to paint all the spindles that went into the railing around the perimeter.
“Just let me do it,” she said. “I want to help and I can do this sitting down.”
So, we set her up in business with paint, brushes, posts, and a drop cloth on the shady end of the porch, and she went to work.
Spindles are time consuming, fiddly things to paint — as I was reminded this past week when we took on the job again.
My sister was on the outside edge of the porch, trampling over the four-o’clocks and various grass specimens, and I was on the inside of the railing — painting.
“We’ll knock this out in no time,” I said optimistically.
Actually, in real time, it took quite a few hours.
The next day we moved everything off the porch and power washed the house and the deck in preparation for sealing the deck with a concoction of preserving oil and stain.
It looked like rednecks lived on my acre with miscellaneous furniture all over the lawn and sidewalks. It took most of the week for things to settle down and get back to normal.
During all this falderal, the ducks patiently waited for me to call out to them, open the door of their pen, and let them out for a swim on the pond, which is really only a little bigger than a puddle, the size of my guest bathroom, but I call it “The Pond.”
The ducks don’t get out and about all that often because my sister has seen another fox in town, so I don’t let the ducks roam around willy-nilly.
They are curious ducks, and sooner rather than later they get bored with splashing water and head for tall grass, which is someone else’s property and dangerous but they don’t know it.
Dandy, my resident male duck, scans the sky when “the girls” are in The Pond but doesn’t seem to give a lot of attention to the bushes and tall grass.
A couple of months ago, I noticed a rather big frog in residence at The Pond, and once my attention was drawn, it seemed that every few weeks there were more visible frogs of all sizes that I was discovering.
Through the years, the main residents of The Pond changed from fish, plants, water snakes, frogs, and more frogs, an occasional turtle, and water lilies.
Ducks came to the backyard, and all vegetation was gone from inside The Pond. There’s still plenty around the outside, so it’s become a cozy little nook.
I let the ducks out only once or twice a week to swim, bathe, and cavort on The Pond, and this past week they didn’t even get that because I was too busy to just sit and watch them for an hour.
They all suggested, by quacking and fluttering their wings in anticipation, that it was time for a splash in the pool whenever I replenished food and water, but I hadn’t accommodated their wishes until yesterday.
“Today’s the day,” I said when I approached the duck pen and opened the door.
Daffy, the biggest duck, led the way, waddling as fast as she could. Plop! A frog flew up out of the grass in front of her and landed in the pond.
The ducks stopped in their tracks.
“What’s in our pond?” Daisy wanted to know.
By this time they were on the sidewalk at the edge of the pond, necks craning.
Plop, plop! Two more frogs hit the water. Dandy quacked “danger” in his low chortling voice, and all four ducks veered away.
“C’mon you guys,” I said. “That’s just a little frog. Nothing to be scared of.”
But the ducks disagreed. They reconnoitered briefly, huddled together on the sidewalk, and then waddled away from the pond and began hunting for bugs in the grass.
The Pond is usually a murky puddle, and I don’t know exactly what fueled their fear this time except that the water was clear.
I’d accidentally let the water run longer when I was filling it for the ducks’ bath, and sediment had settled to the bottom — too clear for the ducks because they could see frogs scurrying for cover and it gave them the heebie jeebies, so they refused to go in.
I told my grandson this story, and he said, “I would have thought the smaller frogs would have been tasty snacks for the ducks.”
I said, “Me, too, but they evidently aren’t, and they were scared of them.”
“So did you ever get them to go into the pond?” Dagfinnr asked.
“I had to appease them,” I laughed. “I went in and got some frozen peas and threw them onto the water.”
If you know ducks, you can guess the rest of the story. Ducks love peas. Soon they were in the water, nibbling up the peas. But they didn’t stay long. The water was too clear, and they could still see things they weren’t used to seeing evidently.
Early on in my duck educational cycle, I learned that ducks hate change. A strange person or an unusual raincoat scares them, and they won’t even come out of the pen no matter how much they want to go for a swim.
It’s just another day in the country, and I can’t give them too much strife about this because human beings can be the very same way.