SO LONG

This morning, Buster and I ventured out into a different season. Just yesterday we were enjoying a beautiful autumn day, and today we slipped into winter. Buster didn’t have a problem, because he has four feet to help him with his balance, and I am unbalanced at the best of times. That is for another day though.

I couldn’t help but notice the ducks quacking in the sky overhead. Every year it seems to be the same thing, the ducks just hang out in the wetlands doing ducky things all spring, summer and fall, but they just have to push their luck and always stay just a little too late. They were flying overhead and if that weren’t enough to make me more than a little nervous, there wasn’t any apparent leader. How are they going to head south if they are directionless?

Louise used to work at a place that was less than ideal work wise, but it was excellent for staring out the window at the golf course lake. For most of the year she would stare at the fountain, or watch the golfers driving their balls into the lake. (That sounds kind of dirty, but it isn’t.) In the fall, when the golfers had pretty much given up for the year, the ducks would take over the lake. They would practice getting in order and then taking off, form a “V” or rough approximation in the sky, circle a few times and then come in for a landing. They would do this over and over and over. Probably it was the duck equivalent of learning French verbs and grammar. This would go on for weeks, I guess until they got it right. Then one day Louise would go to work only to find that all she had to do was either stare at snow or work. I would have picked the snow staring, but I think Louise did that other thing.

Now, the ducks that Buster and I were looking at today didn’t have that dedication to learning that Louise’s ducks did. I had a feeling that we were watching some seriously delinquent ducks. It was either that, or they were retarded. I am from Ontario and the ducks there fly in a “V” formation, I imagine it is fowl drafting. These ducks couldn’t even do a straight line! They did a passable “S”, a pretty good “O”, an “L”, an “O”, a real good “N” and finally a “G”. Thankfully, they were no longer overhead and they seemed to be heading in a southerly direction. I can’t really blame them for being stupid, after all they have a brain pan the size of a grain of rice. They can really only go by instinct and that instinct tells them to fly south in the fall and north in the spring.

If I were a duck I would probably just stay south and save all of the needless flying. Maybe the cost for health insurance is just too much if they stay for more than four months. North, south, north, south, north etc. this can go on for from seven to twenty years, assuming the hunters are bad shots. Well, it has been nice having the ducks here for the summer, so as they flew out of sight, Buster and I waved and yelled out “SO LONG”.

Hey, just a minute…