Every year, where I live, the ducks come in late January. They mate, nest, and raise their young here. This year, the third year I observed this glorious tradition, I was up early on January morning and I heard the quack of a female duck. It was unrepentant quacking at 5:30 in the morning, an all out bitch fest, and it was all music to my ears. The ducks were back.
This year was different from the others. I spied the ducklings a good two weeks after Memorial Day, when I sighted them last year, which felt way too late then, asI I had seen them on Easter the year before. In past years, it had mostly been the female duck wth the ducklings. This year, both a female and a male swam with them. And it was quickly a diminished crew -- from 8 to 2. I think one perished in the parking lot. We have a structure underneath the building, and one evening, when I was about to go out, I heard a duckling peeping. It was a time when people were coming home from work. I watched them get out of their cars and head resolutely to the elevator, oblivious to me and the duckling, while we danced around cars. A duckling can be fast, especially one that's scared. I tried to catch it for a while and then gave up. The next night, when I saw them in the water, only two ducklings remained. I hoped it was somehow a fluke, but that has been the true number ever since.
There's an initiation for the ducklings here. At a point in the process, they swim in the pool. They can get in the water, but aren't big enough yet to get out. The mother squawks until a human comes and positions a chaise longue in the water so that the duckling can use it as stairs. I think of this tribe of ducks, the ones that come back every year, and imagine that the chaise longue is a part of their symbology, something that the elders tell them to expect, one of the important tools in their tool box beore they reach the important developmental step of exiting the pool on their own.
The other day, I heard the peeping and the squawking, and I looked out to see the duckling in the pool. One was already big enough to make it out. They were growing up fast this year, but the other couldn't quite do it. I went down to put the chair in the water, but when I reached the pool, I saw that it had been done. I looked over to the man lying in the sun.
"You know about the ducks," I said.
He told me he watched them every year, that he loved them. I told him that I looked out for them, too.
