How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks. —Dorothy L. Sayers
Geraldine is my summer pond buddy. When she hears my front door open—200 yards up the lane—she begins to quack as she leaves the pond and waddles up to greet me. Generally we meet halfway. As we work our way down to the pond, she stays at my side all the way to the bench at the eastern edge of the pond. This is the feeding spot, the place where I dig into the coffee can of fish food and fling handfuls of pellets across the pond. The second the pellets hit the water, it churns with sunfish, bass, catfish, and koi. These are National Geographic-worthy feeding frenzies as hundreds of fish attack the surface, which boils with activity.
And this is the sweet spot for Geraldine, for I always drop the first handful of food on the ground for her and then drop handfuls near the shoreline where she doesn’t have to fight off the sunfish. She’s the lone survivor of a group of ducklings my daughter and son-in-law raised in their garage and later transferred to the pond. For years, they’ve bought ducklings in the spring at the local farm implement store, and we’ve watched them grow under the heat lamp in their garage pen. And for years, we’ve lamented the dismal survival rate at the pond where predators—mostly foxes—pick them off much too quickly. One year, we lost 6 of the 13 ducks on their first night at the pond. The others disappeared over the course of a week. Geraldine is our Freya, our Norse goddess of war and love who has already made her mark in pond mythology. She’s the stuff duck legends are made of, eluding predators for months and living companionably with the pond fish.
Because I live in the country and because I’m too old to care (much), I talk to Geraldine as we stroll to the pond each evening. When she refuses to move from the middle of the lane, I put my car in park, get out, and urge her toward the pond with the diplomacy she deserves. Because Geraldine is so social (or so foolhardy?), I have to tighten the leash on our young Labrador who’d like nothing more than to practice her retrieval skills on such an easy mark. Just the other day when I walked down to our mailbox, I looked back to see Geraldine hoofing it toward me. You gotta love a duck like her who’s remarkably sociable in every circumstance. She’s a feathered testament to English novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers’ contention that “all human passions are fleeting compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”
My father, Nebraska poet Don Welch, claimed that “[w]e know ourselves through corresponding things” and that “the supreme value of a thing may be its thingness, its irreducible, but wonderful value; its one-of-a-kindness.” This summer, as I’ve walked at the nature preserve or around our pond, I’ve discovered the thingness, that irreducible value of so many things: orange butterfly weed, indigo buntings, Queen Anne’s Lace, sunfish spawning beds, Baltimore orioles, and one beloved duck named Geraldine. I’ve seen the human condition in the indigo bunting, which appears as a dark, ordinary bird until a sunray ignites it, and it bursts into a cerulean and otherworldly brilliance. Isn’t this the way for most of us, how we don’t shine until another’s light falls upon us? I’ve looked daily for orange blossoms along the trail where, for weeks, butterfly weed blazed along the road. Until it didn’t, and I mourned the occasional orange that punctuated the fields of coneflowers and Black-eyed Susans. Weeks later, when it bloomed again, I was reminded that “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3: 1-2). And each evening when Geraldine meets me on the lane, and we begin our trek to the eastern edge of the pond, I marvel at her constancy, that regardless of the day I’ve had, she shows up. I’ve learned this about myself: how grateful I am for this constancy, a rare gift in any season of life. My father was right: “We know ourselves through corresponding things.”
One look at Geraldine reveals her mallard blood. Even though she’s been bred and raised domestically, I’m pulling for her to migrate south this fall before the pond freezes over. I hope she hears the call of her wild cousins as they fly over. I hope she’s got the wings and instinct to join them. And I hope that, as much as I value her companionship, I’ll celebrate her leaving.
