Only the Mama Duck Knows

I walk on a canal towpath most mornings.

Right now is the best time of the year. A sweet spot, actually. Winter's cold has long passed and the mosquitoes are not yet buzzing around. The air is thick with the heady fragrance of honey suckle and wild rose. There are ducklings and goslings and cygnets. Turtles sun themselves on felled branches that rise from murky waters. Dragonflies cast shadows, but are elusive to the naked eye. Everything is lush and green and growing.

I'd spend all day walking if I could.

And maybe I will one of these days when I've got a whole day free. 

Wild yellow irises grow out of the waters. Yellow water lilies grow out of the waters. Both plants lead seemingly impossible lives. Actually, all life along this waterway feels impossible to me. 

I count the ducklings every day. They hatched sometime on Monday and the first time I saw them was Tuesday morning. They were mounded together on the grassy swath between the path and the canal. Right out there in the open. A guy who fishes in the same spot every day told me he saw thirteen of them right after they hatched. On Tuesday morning there were ten. On Wednesday there were nine. On Thursday there were eight. On Friday there were five. We'd had dangerous storms the previous three days and it was possible that some of them were lost to the storm. Others to foxes, hawks, and other predators that prowl there. I don't know how the mama duck can stand it.

The strangest thing happened today.

I saw the ducks in the distance as I walked, grateful that they'd survived another day of storms. I wondered where they hid during the storms. How they sheltered. I thought about seeing them two days before at a distance, across the canal in a wide lagoon. That was the day after the first set of storms moved through the area. We'd had tornado warnings, high winds, and torrential downpours. Yesterday they'd been in their usual spot in the grass between the canal and the path. Before the storm. they'd started to venture down the canal - the ducklings followed their mother, swimming and foraging for food while they meandered downstream. Today they were once again in their usual spot and there were eight ducklings.  

I've been documenting with photographs and checked my photos from yesterday. I wondered if somehow the three ducklings had been sleeping beneath their other five siblings and I'd somehow just not seen them. Nope. Five ducklings the day before. Eight today. I marveled at the wonders of nature. Had they been lost and found their way back? Had they been hidden and then retrieved by their mother? Did they belong to another mother and were adopted by this one?

I don't know. It's a mystery.

It's also a mystery to me that this writing became about ducklings when I'd planned to write about wild morning glories. You never know where a prompt will take you.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 is a riff off a Natalie Goldberg retreat I attended in 2016, where every day we wrote from prompts and shared what we wrote. Part of my second annual 100 Day Summer Writing Practice, I'll be writing whatever comes to mind and not editing my ideas. So, writing and putting that writing out into the world. Every. Single. Day.