Sad Duck, Happy Duck

A pause from goats to consider and fall in love with the poultry

Okay, so I have to tell you about the duck. In case you didn’t see my last post, I am house-sitting at a goat farm where there are five goats, three dogs and three cats, and a duck. I don’t even know the duck’s name, though I will find out. I call her Duck.

Right before I started this gig in mid-February, a fourth dog, who is part Border Collie, killed the second duck. Apparently it’s not the first time a duck has been taken out this way, and the dog was just acting on instinct and I’m sure was immediately horrified at the consternation this caused.

This left one duck, and having never really hung around with domesticated ducks, I didn’t know much about duck psychology. This second duck, Duck, was freaking out.

When I first saw her, she was sort of running around in her pen quack-screaming, and the feathers on her long neck were all sticking out. She had a wild look in her eyes. She was in deep grief and panic. I texted the homeowner that I didn’t think the duck was doing too well, and she replied that I should look for a mirror that was stashed in the house and put it in the duck’s pen, as this would calm the duck down. Because ducks need other ducks.

Duck almost immediately seemed overjoyed to see a duck friend, not realizing that it was herself in the mirror. She curled up next to the mirror, chattering in a friendly way, her neck happily curled so she could see and snuggle with this friend. I don’t know if she thought it was her friend who’d been killed or a new friend, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Here is a picture of Duck and her friend in the mirror.

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I had told my son the story of the duck, and then one night I had to call him when he was home from school for the weekend to help me with the door of the goat’s pen, which had fallen off the track. He and his friend Alex showed up and saved the day, and then I showed them around and introduced them to the duck, and my son, who has a sensitive heart that I adore, turned to me with a stricken look and said, “That is even sadder than I imaged.”

In a way, it was. For a while I was thinking a lot about grief and calling her Grief Duck, trying to mind my own grief and understand that I needed to be gentle with myself, that the aftermath of difficulty, and really life in general, requires that I tend to myself as I am tending to these animals, not just by feeding them but by giving them things that seem to be non-essential but are very essential: talking to them and rubbing their necks and saying hello and enjoying them.

But it was also undeniable: she was also so HAPPY. As I was sitting upstairs each morning writing and working, her loud happy squawking would resound through the yard and windows. She was a loud duck. At first I was thinking of her as Memento Memori duck, as if she was the voice of the universe laughing at the small plans and dreams of humans.

But every day, she made me so glad.

Every morning she was so HAPPY to waddle out to the outside yard with the goats, and then she spent the day digging for bugs in the hay and her beak would be all coated with mud and even occasionally a few feathers stuck to that mud. And this squawk: it made me laugh. (Apparently sometimes you just get a loud duck, which I discovered to my delight in the online forum “Backyard Chickens” under the topic “Female duck quacking her head off for no reason?”

Here’s a video where you can hear her, and I kind of want to make it my ring tone.

I got obsessed with getting ducks, and my sister had to pry that desire away from me via text message, because apparently they are also a ton of work and I live in a pretty densely settled area, and if I happened to get a loud duck, I would be so happy but my neighbors would be so sad.

Over the next week, I began to realize two things. First, I wanted to be a goat (shifty, knobby, climby, inscrutable, punk-rock) but that I am a duck (loud, despondent, pleased with life, low to the ground). Second, I began to realize that the duck with her mirror was not sad. This was freaking incredible: a reminder that of course we need each other, that she will have another friend in real life, and that needing other ducks or people is a wonderful thing. But for the time being, in the middle of this sad phase in her life, she is her own best friend.

I have lots of besties, but I have also tried harder and harder (and softer and softer) to be a good friend to myself. It has taken work, and by work, I mean the opposite of work. I have had to learn to rest, to not work, to lay down and find relaxation and things that help restore me. I have needed—and am still working on this—to learn that relying on myself doesn’t have to be panic inducing, because that duck I see in the mirror knows what she’s doing. As far as best friends go, she’s pretty great. I am constitutionally wired to need other ducks, and that’s a strength, and I also have my own self on my side through troubles and challenges. That need is not a weakness, it’s a strength, and I too can be comforted by the image of the person I see in the mirror.

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A few happy things to end this ducky post:

My essay collection, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook, was named a finalist in the essay category for the Foreword Indies.

And I was asked to write the Bridgeport entry on a massive project called "Mapping Inequality," which traces the effects of redlining into today in cities around the country. I was able to integrate my research on specific Bridgeport neighborhoods including the West End around the P.T. Barnum Apartments, Hunktown, and the effects of urban renewal on that area. The site is very cool, with interactive links that you can click on to show how red-lined zones continue to bear the costs of economic exclusion and segregation in the U.S.

Thanks, as always, for reading and for your comments xoxox