We All Need the Glamorous Life


It's time for me to tell the truth.  I know you all think I am living the glamourous life. And while traipsing around in Muck boots knee deep in dung is pretty sexy, sometimes living on the farmette kinda sucks.

There are the gardening frustrations:
"The caterpillars are eating my kale. It's too cool for my peppers. It's too hot for my arugula.  No rain in the forecast this week. I'd better drag 1000 feet of hose up the hill.  Rain again?  Bring on the Blight."

There are the animal frustrations:

"Is that a deer in the backyard staring into the window?  Shit, Noelle has escaped again!"  

"Mom, the cat's left another squirrel tail and heart in the mudroom!"
"Come on Rooster.  I dare you to try to spur me.  I WILL hit you with this shovel."

"Where did those two sticks of butter go that I just left on the counter?"

There are the combination animal and gardening frustrations:

"Get out of the garden Noelle!"

eggsicle

There is the bone chilling cold:
"The water in the barn is frozen again.  At least it is easy to clean out the stall.  We can just throw the poopsicles into the garden."

And then there are the Predators:
A few months back when the grass was still green and the pond free of ice, we were getting ready to bring our meat birds to the butcher, I brought up the uncomfortable subject of... the ducks, at the breakfast table.

"Maybe we should bring the ducks in as well?"

Spoons froze midway to open mouths and a rare silence settled over the room.

"I will never forgive you if you kill the ducks," replied James Dean. The subject was dropped.

"No one will let me eat the ducks," I complained to a friend at school.  She gave me the same look of revulsion my family had and proceeded to silently flick through the photos on her phone until she came across an adorable shot of her daughter holding one of our fluffy yellow ducklings.

The ducklings were very cute and I had hoped to include duck eggs in my ovum empire, but alas all of my ducks were drakes and my dreams were dashed.  Still, they were pretty and they kept the pond clean, but as winter approached, I dreaded what was going to happen to them once the pond froze.  My fear was that some predator was going to be enjoying the confit I had been forbidden.

The drakes did an impressive job of keeping the ice off the pond well past Christmas, but one week- long arctic blast was too much and the pond froze.

We wanted to bring them into the barn, but they eluded our attempts to corral them. We brought a chicken tractor down to the pond but they would not enter.  The husband built a crazy shelter he titled, "Dada Duckhouse."  They shunned this shelter as well, preferring to huddle together in the tall grass that poked out through the snow.

About a week later the husband went down to the pond to feed them and they were gone without a trace. I wanted to believe that they had flown south or that they ventured into the woods to live out their days with Itty Bitty Kitty and her husband JFK (that's an earlier post), but I knew something much more sinister must have happened.

We noticed some specks of frozen blood on the snow and we all took solace in the fact that some poor hungry wild animal had found some food to sustain itself for a little while longer.  I was slightly relieved.  Though I had wanted to eat them myself, I can't stand the idea of animals suffering and I worried about them every night out in the cold.

Just as we had made peace with the fact that we were now duckless, the Husband came in the house holding Quackers.  I actually don't know if it was Quackers, because they all looked exactly alike, but Quackers was my favorite of the names the boys had given the ducklings.  Quackers was covered in blood and in shock.   We drew him a warm bath and were glad to discover the blood was not his.  We found out from our neighbor that the brave little guy had come down the hill out of his woods and crossed the street into our yard. I can't imagine the carnage this boy must have witnessed.

We washed him and cooed over him and gave him something to eat.  It has been two weeks.  I still have a drake in my bathtub and probably will until Spring. Anyone want a pet duck?