Fragment #6
It started with the egg. Or did it start with the duck?
In late April an egg appeared in a small hollow against the garden wall, under the fast-sprouting tiger lilies in the first flush of spring. An egg!
In week whatever of the pandemic this was cause for wild excitement. My downstairs neighbors put up some orange tape and a sign, rendered in chalkboard paint: Caution! Duck nest.
We knew it was a duck because, well, there had been ducks hanging around and also because this time last year a duck had nested along the same wall, about ten feet to the west of the current egg. Was it the same duck? Probably? My apartment and large yard, which is shared with five other buildings, are about two blocks from a public park whose lagoon is home to a range of urban waterfowl: aggressive hordes of Canada geese, a few flashy wood ducks, and mallards—so many mallards, in swimming around in twos and experimental threes as the spring crept in. Why this particular pair of mallards had decamped from the park to paddle in the pond in our yard, in fractious coexistence with some oversized koi, is a mystery. But they had, in April, and then there was an egg.
For several days there was just the one, and no sign of the hen that laid it. And it being April in Chicago, of course it got cold, and then it snowed. My neighbors, panicked, brought the egg indoors to keep it warm and then, informed by a friend that it was in fact illegal to interfere with the nests of migratory birds, put it back, and then we watched, and waited. For ten days there was nothing and then—amazing—a second egg! And then a third and a fourth and then one a day for the five days that followed, bringing the total to nine.
As the eggs appeared, one by one, the nest also got furnished with a fluffy rim of dark-brown down, and then a top layer, a duvet for the eggs. But there was still no sign of the hen. She seemed to arrive under cover of darkness to deposit her cargo and then hit the road by dawn. For a week she was a mystery until, on the morning of the ninth day, there she was, and there she remains today, tucked under the ever-thickening lilies, nesting.
I go out to check on her every day, often more than once. Some days she is asleep, her billed head tucked into the crook of her neck in an anatomical contortion unfathomable to the human body. Other days she’s awake, staring into the middle distance at … what? Her future?
One day she’s facing east and then the next she’s turned to the south, gazing into the garden wall with imperturbable calm. It’s been getting progressively warmer and correspondingly wetter, and in recent days the rain has flooded from the sky. The garden is lush, drenched in growth, the redbuds a riot of blooms, weaving a pink carpet of fallen blossoms across the yard. And the duck sits. Unhurried. Patient. Protected by the lilies’ lance-like leaves, a dense umbrella of green.
Isolated. Waiting.
Here, dear reader, is where you recognize that this winding duck tale is an allegory. “Aha!” you think—the duck is all of us, trapped in quarantine, waiting for nature to take its course. There are lessons to be learned from mama duck. Lessons about acceptance, for sure, and about trusting in the truths of science. It takes 28 days to incubate an egg; 28 days in which we watch and wait to see what happens next: will there be ducklings? Will there be birth, joy, renewal?
Here is where perhaps I will insert some scientific facts about the mating habits of ducks, the details of which more than one friend following along with my duck updates on social media has shared. Did you know that a male duck has a long, corkscrew-shaped penis? And that it has to fit just so into the female duck’s equally corkscrewed vagina? That duck sex is terrifically violent? But that crafty hens have multiple vaginal spirals, only one of which leads to fertilization and that they can trick the drake into penetrating one of the dead-end cavities to avoid unwanted pregnancy? So many metaphors for human heterosexuality to be generated here, if darkly.
Or maybe I will shift the chronology with an abrupt jump to childhood. When I was little, for several summers running, a pair of ducks would often wander up from the bay at the foot of the hill to hang out on our lawn. They were similarly nondescript mallards, and my sisters and I named them, with the laterally leaping logic of children, “Mork” and “Daisy.” Emerald-headed Mork, obviously, after the adorably bumbling, suspenders-clad alien of our favorite tv show, and it would have made sense, wouldn’t it, to name his drab, speckled companion after sensible brunette Mindy, but, no, we didn’t go there.
Thinking about it this week I couldn’t remember the origins of “Daisy.” We knew no Daisys, either in the gang of neighborhood kids we ran with or among the adults who drifted through our play. We had not yet read the Great Gatsbyand could not have sensed then the reckless tragedy baked into this plainspun name. There weren’t even any daisies in the yard. It speaks to something about pandemic brain that it took three days for the lightbulb to go on. Daisy Duck, flirtatious consort of Donald, in her bow and pumps and exposed fluffy bottom. How could I forget?
Mork and Daisy never really did anything terribly exciting. But they showed up on the regular, every year, to sit. Why our lawn? It wasn’t particularly duck friendly, there was no pond, no cache of food, just grass with some hydrangeas and rhododendrons and a large hedge of Oregon grape, and a sea of dandelions in spring. We were only special in that they chose us, and we loved them for that.
I could now pivot and disarm you with a confession: there’s a duck that lives in my house. It’s smaller than a mallard, with a dingy beige body and bright orange, corduroy beak and it is stuffed, not as in taxidermy but as in stuffed animal. It once belonged to my college boyfriend and I don’t remember when it drifted into my care, unremarked. We had a painful breakup almost thirty years ago, and the duck disappeared after that, submerged under the bed in a box now topped up with mementos of loss and regret. I don’t remember when or why it resurfaced, no less the worse for wear. It could have been March; it could have been 2018. He and I are old friends now, and this duck of his is a comfort. I’ve become attached to ritual in these blank days and every night I check in with it before giving in to grateful nothingness. I give its bill a tweak; its breast a sniff. I go to sleep with it tucked into the palm of my hand. Does this change your vision of me? Do I seem more vulnerable? Or do I seem simply sad?
I ask because in recent days my backyard duck tales have taken their own strange and disarming turn. I’ve been trying to write about it all weekend but it’s hard to spin into narrative something that simply makes no sense. Something that stretches back into the past, when the ducks were then chickens, but the story remains the same: the patient waiting, the citizen science, the easy metaphors of growth and renewal. Something that lays bare the precarity of renting, and the edgy dance one does when navigating it. Something that involves the abrupt destruction of a small shared space that was at the same time mine alone, where I felt safe. Something that involves, absurdly, a dozen additional duck eggs, an incubator, a wading pool, and a repurposed elevator cage.
The details don’t actually matter. What matters is that for weeks I’ve been spinning to anyone who would listen a charming story about a patient mama duck, clinging to this linear narrative as uncertainty and confusion fog the future. I’ve latched onto the duck because in a moment when there is literally nothing to look forward to, the march of 28, 27, 26 days and so on leading to (by my calculations) the potential for a storybook June 1 moment of fluffy yellow cuteness and peeping joy, is decidedly not nothing.
Last year, when the duck laid her eggs, I was similarly if less urgently enthralled. The man I was seeing at the time failed to see the whimsy. They’re just ducks, he said, baffled. It turns out he was right.
Last year’s ducks hatched at dawn and by 10 am they were gone. Someone caught them on video but I missed the whole thing. An unsatisfying conclusion to that narrative, one that left far too many questions unanswered: Where did they go? How did they get out of the yard? They were so small, could they even make it to the park? We’ll never know.
I remind myself of that lack of closure now. Daisy 2, if we can call her that, is not out there in the tiger lilies in the epic pouring rain to offer me (and those of you following along on Twitter) a narrative epiphany. My efforts to spin any sense out of her stoic sitting are entertainments, no more. Take and make from them what you will. The absurdity is the meaning; the faith that something or nothing may happen, someday or never, is the story.
***
My god this took two weeks to spit out and I’m still horribly dissatisfied with it but, also, the point of this newsletter is to drop a bomb on my own perfectionism, so in that sense: success!
I hope you’re doing well. The dark weird crankiness of this fragment notwithstanding, I am fine. I am healthy and working and so very grateful for it all. I taught my last class at Columbia this week and while I’m glad it’s one less thing on the plate, I also was strangely bereft when I shut down the final Zoom. I learned a lot about my own capabilities and limitations as a teacher during this UTTERLY BIZARRE first semester, and it’s going to take a while to untangle it all. But I’m so glad I did it.
Also this week I sent the new version of the Soup & Bread Cookbook off to the printer! This project continues to inform my values and shape my thinking in ways I never imagined in 2009. The book should be available in a few weeks, and can be ordered here, if you’re so inclined.
And speaking of cookbooks, I also finished up edits on the Belt Cookie Table Cookbook, by my friend Bonnie Tawse. One of the last things I did before the shutdown was drive with Bonnie to Ottawa, Illinois, to go to a Soup & Bread event there, and along the way she spun her own hilarious and charming story about her odyssey into the world of Youngstown cookie tables. You can read all about it in the book, and learn how to bake 40+ authentic cookie table cookies, for a day when we can all gather together again. (It also features a terrific foreword by the lovely Beth Kracklauer, repping for the Pittsburgh side of things.)
What I’m reading: this breathtaking essay by art critic Jerry Saltz. What I’m watching: The Restaurant finally ended (boo!) and now I’m onto the French spy serial The Bureau. English-language reality is far too much right now, I’m taking my relaxation in other languages.
I bought new flatware on the internet at the end of March, and it arrived last week and precipitated an unprecedented wave of kitchen-cabinet cleaning that has given me a lot of pleasure. I’ve never had matching flatware before. What other great changes does 2020 have in store? I guess we sit and wait and see.
I’m still excited about ducklings.