EGGS!

FINALLY!! After weeks of checking the nesting boxes, we have our first eggs! We're lucky that either Macrina or Petra (they don't sign their work, so who knows) used the boxes so carefully made for this purpose. After all, every night it's a not-very-friendly race between Bernie and Basil to see who gets which nesting box to sleep in. The girls wait out the war; eventually one or the other takes the third box. I don't see this part, so I assume the odd duck out just snuggles down somewhere nearer the warm light bulb. Smart duck.

Sadly, Simon dispatched our smallest (and clearly female) duck from this life a few weeks ago. Slave to those old murderous genes, he caught her in the open field, and she was too small to fly away. She came down with a nasty cold early in her life, and spent several days in the cat carrier in my bathroom. I hoped that filling the room with warm steam would help her breath more easily. Miraculously she made it, though she was clearly way behind in her development. Nature — hard at work maintaining sturdy stock.

That left Teresa, whom we've been calling Terry, thinking s/he might be a drake. It's still up for grabs, but we got two more females, half-sisters to her/him, and they are the same size — a major gender-determining factor. All three of them are white, like Bernie. Maybe we're going to luck out after all and the Triplets of Belleville will join Macrina and Petra on the egg production line when they mature.

We're lucky to have found these eggs for another reason. Muscovy ducks are famous (or infamous) for depositing eggs anywhere but a nesting box: a pile of leaves, any grassy area, under the bushes ... so these may not actually be their first eggs. But we're going to hang on to that belief anyway.

It's so amazing. Years of buying eggs at the grocery store, and I never marveled at what I was doing or what I was getting. Now I pick up a "free" egg in the back yard, rather nasty-looking until cleaned up, and am just blown away by the miracle of it. How sad that with the onslaught (an apt choice of word) of factory farming, we consumers lost all sense of the mystery that drives energy exchange. Eggs are good, but when we eat what is produced by "our" ducks — after watching them grow up, traipsing (or flying) around the property, learning their routines and watching them establish relationship with each other — well, that makes a difference in my consciousness. I'm deeply aware that eggs, though plentiful, are still miraculous.

Only humans could (and did) dream up the idea to start charging money for the natural gifts of creation. Only humans could (and did) set up factories that had to squelch their workers' ability to see birth, life and death as miraculous in order to treat the animals and plants in ways that would enable huge profit-centered production. Oh, I know we can't all set up mini-farms in our back yards; we know how very, very fortunate we are to have access to the land that allows us to do that. But we consumers have lots of power; we could stop supporting factory farming, and start encouraging local farmers again.

We've been lulled into believing that factory farming provides cheap food. That couldn't be more wrong, especially when we consider the cost to the Earth and all her living systems. Big business marketing also purports to provide healthy food from its mega-system, but that is wrong, too. Mass production demands a whole array of drugs and chemicals to keep its "products" going, and our bodies don't need, nor can they handle, that kind of assault.

So, yes, when we pick up fresh, organic eggs just out back, it is a miracle — and a precious gift.

Nap time

The pressure's on: the first frost is looming, and the garden needs to be put to bed for its long winter's nap. Move the greens to the greenhouse or into the seed rooms on the second floor; mulch the strawberries, shore up the fences, harvest all the last-minute stragglers, transplant some herbs and harvest the rest, enlarge the kitchen garden, move the lilac and azalea, cut back the peony leaves and stems. No need to bother cutting back the hosta; the deer have kindly done that for us all summer long. Now no self-respecting slug would come near them for their long winter's nap.

We didn't get it all done. And by sundown yesterday three of us were walking like we'd celebrated our centenaries several years ago. Shoveling rocks and moving big pots full of wet dirt and cold-sensitive plants will do that to a spine.

But, oh, what satisfying work it was, painful backs notwithstanding. Things look almost too trim, now that most of the wild greenness is gone. The neat raised beds are obvious again, the mad profusion of sweet potato vines and marigolds gone to compost. Even underground must look different to the voles. I can hear them now, "Hey ... what happened to those yams??" Sorry guys, they're safely tucked into boxes in the basement for our winter consumption. You should have planted your own.

It seems only days ago that we were madly trying to get things planted, that there was no Duck Lane or Duckville Manor, that the trees were still bare and the days too cold to get the peas into the ground. And here we are again, winter lurking around the corner. Soon we'll be collecting maple sap and filling the house with the sweet smell of class A syrup.

Spring leaps into summer, which passes in an eye-blink, and there's never enough time to be bored by autumn colors before the first snow, which heralds the impending mapling season that hints of spring. I can still feel March's subtle disappointment that I hadn't tired of snow before it was gone.

I needn't have worried. It snowed today.

Outcasts

Basil [r] spent last night on the chapel roof.

We're fairly certain this is happening because in the tradition of barnyard fowl pecking order, Basil's on the bottom. Everyone picks on him, literally. So I guess he finally got fed up with it and decided to hang out in the only other fairly safe place he could find.

It must have been miserable, since this roof is metal and is always wet. His feet may be frozen to the roof this morning; we'll just have to wait and see how he fared. But I know he's still there, because I checked on him at 4:15 when I got up, and he was still up there, standing just like he was at 8:00 last night.

We humans do it, too. "They" (that is, the latest out-group) don't belong here. She's so weird. He doesn't fit in. They aren't as smart as we are, they're a different color, their sexual orientation or gender identity isn't "normal" (though by whose standards?). They are from the wrong side of town. The reasons are rife, and the consequences usually mean.

In any number of ways, "they" are from across the border. Locally there is a big move to get rid of people from Mexico, Ecuador and Brazil. They are "illegal aliens" — a sweeping generalization (and a completely artificial differentiation) that is supposed to justify their place at the bottom of the human pecking order. Much of our exclusionary behavior is based on human construct, not on reality. This is my place, and you don't belong here. Interesting.

But check it out — there are no borderlines on this planet. We are all expressions of Earth, which is one of many expressions of the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of many expressions of the Universe. The Universe: the One Story. In spite of our long experience of acting as if it were not true, there is no out-there, no not-me. We are all differentiated expressions of the sacred One.

We aren't behaving exactly like the ducks, though; they are obeying genetic instructions that say each drake needs three or four females to preserve a healthy reproductive environment. The other ducks don't hate Basil; he's just one too many on the male side of the ledger at the moment. Should Bernie become duck a l'orange for a local coyote some day, the remaining ducks would immediately rearrange themselves into a new community, and Basil would no longer be the "outcast". It's not about him, it's about what works to sustain a healthy duck community.

We humans might want to rethink the practice of separating ourselves by artificial borders. It really isn't a very good idea. We may find ourselves on the equivalent of a cold wet roof someday, alone, unable to reach out to or communicate with each other. Which would be truly sad, since we are blessed with wondrous gifts of differentness, one of the immutable manifestations of the essential nature of our Universe. And it well may be that solutions for our current dire environmental straits will arise from within that blessed richness.

So today I think I'll watch myself closely, on the lookout for my own ways of creating separateness where none exists.
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[6:30 AM update: Basil had flown over to the convent roof—and appeared to be his usual sweet and chipper self—when I went out to ring the Angelus this morning. He may occupy the low rung on the duck family ladder, but he's one tough bird.]