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| My Three Color Choices. They Look Identical Don't They? |
14A-6: Dalen’s Duckling
The color is seems far too gold for a real baby duckling. Or maybe ducklings are that color underneath all the fluffy down. Only white ducks start as the standard yellow fuzzballs that are so often portrayed in media. Sadly, most people don’t realize that most white ducks, when they’re not selling insurance, are a breed of market ducks and meant to become someone’s dinner. Ornamental, egg producing, and even other market ducks are usually other colors, mostly brown and blacks. There’s a very lovely breed of egg-producing ducks that’s a shade of blue-black that would look great on someone’s living-room walls.
Our farm is lacking ducks. We’ve had chickens, pigs, cows, horses…all the standard farm animals from a picture book except goats and ducks and maybe geese. We’re getting goats this spring, to no end of excitement from me. But there’s been talk of getting ducks, just like there was talk of goats and pigs before it came to pass. My mom is particularly partial to the blue-black ones, mostly because they’re great egg-layers. On our farm, function is more important than style.
There’s a pond in the corner of our backyard, but only for about nine months of the year. Every summer it dries up, much to the dismay of whatever tadpoles remain. If we ever got ducks, we’d put a hut there. The babies can swim in the murky water as long as it’s there, chasing mosquitos and damselflies and getting covered in duckweed.
14A-5: Glazed Corn
Ripe corn rolled on a stick of butter, fresh from the pot. It’s too hot to eat, and the fingertips holding it up protest the treatment until the holder grows tired of waiting and takes a bite despite the heat. The thick outer membranes of the kernels end up stuck between teeth, the only downside to eating fresh corn on the cob. Otherwise the entire experience is enjoyable.
I’m the only member of my immediate family who rolls the cob around and eats like that, starting in the middle, moving to the tip of the cob and then to the end. Everyone else goes back and forth down the rows. I’ve been eating that way for as long as I’ve been eating corn on the cob, but it took until I was sixteen for my parents to notice. The two years I went without corn on the cob because of my braces were the worst. It’s just not corn on the cob unless the corn is on the cob. Scraping it off and eating with a fork is just wrong.
I can only eat fresh corn, because I’m opposed to anything that’s been canned or frozen. Corn on the cob for us comes fresh from the garden in front of the house, pulled and peeled the afternoon before dinner. But the freshest corn is eaten right in the garden. Raw. Raw corn is nothing like cooked corn. It’s colder, for one thing, and sweeter, and there’s a grittiness that doesn’t come in cooked corn. I like fresh corn.
Sometimes, while the corn is being peeled, a surprise will come wrapped in the husks. A tiny cob of corn sometimes grows alongside the dominant piece. The kernels aren’t fully formed and the whole thing isn’t very solid. They’re also good to eat.
14A-4: Chickadee
We don’t see the chickadees, but we can sure hear them. The little birds around the farm learned really quickly that they shouldn’t land on the ground. My youngest cat, Roye, is a vicious hunter. If any mice end up in the chicken coop we can just put her in there with them and they’ll go away. My first two cats, Spot and Lily, were great hunters in their prime, but they’re older now. Spot likes lying in the sun and Lily disappears for days to stalk the woods. I’ve seen her behind my grandparent’s house, a block down the road. She was hanging around the bird feeders.
My grandparent’s bird feeders are the only places I see chickadees. Tons will flock around the feeders all the time, and whenever we have dinner at their house I watch them out the patio doors. Sparrows and those other flighty little birds come and go in shifts, and sometimes blue jays show up to boss and bother the others around. All sorts of birds show up at the feeders.
One winter afternoon, my grandma called me over because there was an owl in the trees. Anyone who’s seen my jewelry drawer or my room knows I like owls a lot. And it turns out it was a Barred owl in the tree, not something ordinary like a Screech or a Great Grey owl. Not only was it exciting to see an owl during the day (usually that’s reserved for Great Greys and Snowy owls), but Barred owls are rarer than most. Their closest cousins are the Spotted owls, who only live in the old-wood forests up in Canada. I snapped a few pictures of the owl in the tree from indoors, but when I went outside to get closer it flew away. But it always flew back to the feeders when I moved back. It stayed there until nightfall, before it left for good.
