For those of you who have been listening to Knee Deep for a while, you may know that our residence is visited each year by a pair of ducks we have fondly named Maude and Claude. They swoop in unexpectedly, usually in a snowstorm in mid-March and strut about the property like they own the place. In the North the Snowbirds seek their Florida. In the south Free Bird searches for Lynyrd Skynyrd, but here we have our two mallard ducks who think they are people on vacation to Walden’s Pond. And with full-service puddles, our famous a No-Harm Know Foul policy, I can see why they like us. And did I mention our famous midnight buffet featuring an all-you-can-eat algae bar? What duck could resist that?
This year, R and R for our duck friends extended itself into a third week and then began to creep towards a month, and it was becoming clear that Maud and Claude would leave when they were darn good and ready. However, that darn-good-and-ready started to feel cramped and clumsy to me. When I took the trash out last night, for example, Claude and Maude were doing some kind of exotic dance in the backyard, which appeared to me to be Aboriginal in nature with feathers flying all over, and prominent calls that sounded like someone getting a tooth pulled. I couldn’t open the trash can without interrupting the duck’s ritual, so I began a soft, nonchalant whistle as if I hadn’t seen them. Pursing my lips for a fake whistle made my mouth hurt, more than necessary for a daily trash run. I realized I was whistling an old tune from the Monkeys called “Take the Last Train to Clarksville,” a subliminal message to my duck homies perhaps, but the implication was more than that…with Maude and Claude hanging out too long I was beginning to feel that I was a guest in my own home.
As I walked back inside, trying to extricate myself from the throes of a long pout, I was angry that Maude and Claude had very little respect for our personal space. Yes, they’d probably had nibbled on too much fermented grass, but it was more than that. First, I noticed when they were swimming, most of their movement was confined to paddling action underneath the surface. Above, there did not seem to be much going on, but underneath, those webbed feet were furiously busy, giving the appearance of two ducks that were going somewhere, when they had no intention of going anywhere but in circles. Maude and Claude, truth be known, were just a couple of wind-up toys who didn’t know when to stop, whose switch was set permanently to “GO.” These ducks weren’t going anywhere – they were just too comfortable.
The next day I was in a hurry to leave and I almost ran Maude over in the driveway who was in a full-blown preening session. She looked up at me as I rolled down my window, bill up in the air as if I was in her way. Then, while I waited for her waddle away, I looked over to see Claude eating all the new lily pad shoots. While all this didn’t seem that awful, the thing that flipped my tail feathers was that M and C were downright messy in the area of bathroom hygiene, particularly in the area of getting rid of their waste, or to put it in more graphic terms, the duck logs began to jam up along the Bender Highway. After a couple of days, the errant splatters and Piles O’Whoopsies were a slippery green slope to negotiate. Those skid marks were simply more evidence of poor character and lack of common duck courtesy. I openly complained to my wife that I wished the lovebirds would either clean up after themselves or high tail it on the next mallard migration.
“Can’t they just flush the dang toilet?” I ask my wife quietly one afternoon when the duck couple was napping. “That’s just what you do in polite society.”
“Apparently their parents didn’t think it was that important growing up,” she replied.
“Yea, but honestly, they are mallards! Why would any duck do that? Shouldn’t this information be common knowledge to them by now? I mean, they just let it fly, like whenever,” I said, disgusted.
Always the counselor, my wife noted: “No one will change a behavior that is working for them. Obviously, they are getting their needs met.”
I couldn’t argue with good counseling, so I tried to let it go. Surely, I could sluff off this minor inconvenience. They’d only be here a short while, right? Yet, as their messes accumulated, I began making quiet, passive comments, comments which began to take on tone, and by tone, I mean the kind of inflection that had a sarcastic bearing, a lingering in the air of restlessness. I tried to sleep it off but I had a nightmare where I was eating a lavish duck dinner with all the trimmings.
Then I tried the positive approach, put my happy hat on, act “as if,” saying things like “don’t sweat it,” “life is short,” “there’s bigger fish to fry,” and at one point I believe my wife even slung in a few herself with the ever popular “don’t borrow trouble, and this classic favorite, “You never have to pray for patience because God will give you plenty of opportunity to practice it.”
Truthfully, these tactics were really nothing more than subterfuge, clever stabs at our ducky friends, insults really, and although attempts to overlook our duck’s bad habits did work for short periods of time, we finally had to admit we weren’t being honest with ourselves: Maude and Claude had overstayed their welcome. As much as we liked seeing them fly in each year, they had gotten sloppy and disrespectful in their old age. When are they going to leave?
And instead of doing the healthy thing, being direct and talking to them, my wife and I stuffed our feelings and began a downward and destructive slide into, yes, coduckpendency, which to be psychologically clear, is defined when one is more interested in controlling other ducks than in taking care of yourself.
Instead of addressing the flushing problem in a manner of speaking, head on, I began to make my snarky remarks louder and more often. It wasn’t too long before I found myself slamming cupboards and locking myself in the bathroom to secretly vent my frustrations. There, I did some visual imaging, pretended I was flushing their messes down and away, and prayed that God would grant me the serenity to accept the ducks I could not change, the courage to change the ducks I could and the wisdom to tell the duck difference.
These were just ducks, I thought, cut them some slack, but as I left the bathroom, I ran into “them” coming in and it was all I could do to muster a quack under my breath as they waddled by and exchanged little lovelies with each other.
Then, at the height of my irritation, just when tension had reached its zenith, some odd movement outside in our backyard spa caught my eye – dots of yellow fluff popping up, then disappearing. We didn’t think anything of it at first until the next day when three more dots appeared…four… then five dots – chicky-waddle dots to be exact, scooting around, scrambling behind mom, trying to keep the pace. Apparently, Maude and Claude had been busy all this time, while I was building resentments over their flushing habits, they had been busy readying themselves for their new brood.
The AHA moment hit me. Our yearly duck guests had been sent for a purpose. What I had taken as rudeness had instead been nature’s way of preparing our garden for a new family. Suddenly, a wave of idiocy overcame me for making such a fuss over a few duck accidents in the yard. I had overlooked what was really going on, the building of the next spawning of Maudes and Claudes, the new chirping furry chicks of Alpha Generation.
In the span of a fuzzy instant, the browns of winter left me and the bright yellows of Spring came in to roost. All the time I’d been whining and complaining, Maude and Claude had been out there preparing a new home for their brood, and in a way, also for us. New birth had replaced worries with beauty, and restored duck bothers to duck blessings. In coduckpendency terms, it was a reminder to let the ducks fall where they may. Waiting, when we can do it gracefully, gives nature the wiggle room she needs to dance in the rain, wiggle some tail feathers, or prepare a mallard maternity room and let ducks do what they do, because that is what ducks are going to do anyway. It was also a reminder that while my waiting and waiting may have felt like nothing, it was very much something, and to the life that was breathed into some new ducky chicks out on our pond, it was everything.