I’m all for devoted mothers but this was special. Mama Bear kind of special.
We live on a hobby farm and at one time had a brace of Moscovy ducks. I had to look this up but did you know that a group of ducks can be called a brace, badelynge, bunch or a flock?
While we’re discussing names, a male duck is a drake and a female duck is a …. duck.
The females are blessed with the job of keeping the eggs warm for a month while staring at the blank wall of a barn that never talks back but they don’t even get a special name. That seems wrong, somehow.
Our ducks were wonderful mothers. If you’ve read Make Way for Ducklings you have the right idea. If you haven’t, go read it. It’s short.
One day we stumbled onto a nest of eggs. Maybe this was a whole brace of eggs. I’m not sure. I’m talking dozens. I’m talking a sea of white orbs. I’m talking Egg Mountain.
We couldn’t count them all.
We couldn’t count them all partly because there were two ducks sitting on them. Yeah, weird.
At least they had someone to talk to while waiting for the coming ducklings.
Twenty-one ducklings hatched.
But there aren’t DNA tests for ducklings (well, not on our farm for sure) and we had two ducks with all these babies. Who belonged to whom?
Neither mama was giving up the babies so they worked together. Both lead the way with a long winding line of yellow fuzzy ducklings waddling behind. Twenty-one ducklings makes a long line.
We added more than a bunch to our duck flock. We’d collected a whole badelynge.
Don’t you think those mamas deserved a more amazing name than duck?
A lunar eclipse provided a challenging but interesting photo opportunity. Here’s a composite of some shots I got. I combined several into one photo for another-world look.
Mint plants should come with warning labels. I would have done things differently had I known.
But I bought my mint plant when we moved into our house eleven years ago expecting to have to nurture the tiny leaves.
I tenderly planted the tiny sprouts, protecting their frail roots and pouring water and food to them.
The mint turned warlord on me, wiping out every other plant in the box on its way to world domination. It was threatening to choke off all the weeds. That wasn’t a bad thing but think about what kind of monster plant can defeat weeds.
Rest assured that I stepped up, did my duty, and replanted the mint into a smaller and more contained area.
I battled mint for several years in the first location. It was guerrilla warfare with the new sprouts sneaking up behind iris and lilies. I yanked and they circled around searching for a fresh spot of ground where they emerged with force.
Meanwhile the newly-planted mint filled its new country fast enough to place in the 100-yard dash at the Olympic games.
World domination is still on this mint’s mind. I’m sure of it. Here’s an example.
After a recent summer storm, I stepped outside expected to draw in the fresh scent of rain-cleansed evening air.
But, no, the mint had taken to the airways and my nostrils were assaulted by a mint-drenched breeze.
When I told my daughter about the storm, she said, “Oh, I hope the hail didn’t hurt the mint.”
To which my son replied, “You can’t destroy this mint with a flame thrower.”
“What do you think this says?” my husband studied a small box he’d lifted from the shelf at the grocery store. “Do you know any of these words?”
I browsed the ingredient list.
Browsed in the sense that I tried to put letters together to make words. I knew the letters but I didn’t know the words.
Humbling for an English major.
“Well, this picture could have something to do with an antibiotic,” I said.
His frowned. “That picture could be a pumpkin for all I can tell.”
He was right. The printing was not clear.
We should have brought a translator but the available ones weren’t, well, available. They were tending to our son’s wounded knee. Somehow, in the construction of the new church, his knee had connected with something rough and hard. We had been sent in search of antibiotic cream while they cleaned the gash.
We went, confident that we were reasonably intelligent adults but we were in a Spanish-speaking country where we didn’t know the word for antibiotic. We didn’t even know the word for first aid or bandage.
Finally we settled on a slender box that appeared to have an image of a wound along with the brand name printed on the front plate. It could have been a logo of a whirlwind, too. We weren’t sure but there was a tube in the box. Close enough.
We took our find back to the church and handed the box over to the nurse. She pulled out the tube.
Sometimes you wish you had a translator and you don’t. Sometimes you have a translator and wished you didn’t.
She translated for us then. In between giggles.
Instead of buying antibiotic cream for our son, we’d picked up a tube of Preparation H.
From the time he decorated himself like a Christmas tree , our youngest has brought adventures to our life.
He was the one who rummaged through his father’s toolbox so that he could remove the training wheels from his bike after one day on his little bike. “Those get in the way,” he said.
I awoke once at 2 am to a noise like a strangled cat. Of course I got up.
The Digital Cat
He sat in front of a computer screen playing with a digital cat. Do you know that when you select a digital spray bottle and squirt the digital pet cat, it squawks in a way that makes a three-year-old giggle like a pinched balloon as the air escapes.?
He knows how to hypnotize a baby rabbit and dodge a paint ball. He never has mastered the ability to separate his clean laundry from the pile of clothes on the floor but where’s the adventure in that?
I always wondered what career he’d pursue. Cat tamer? Graphic designer? Sci Fi novelist? Now he’s graduated, employed and moved out.
He loves his job. It has to do with rummaging through phone settings rather than a toolbox and teaching others how to untangle their own phones.
And he’s laundering money, too.
Truly I am thrilled. If he’s laundering money, that means he’s actually putting his clothes in the washing machine.
