Watching an adolescent duck flying upstream and surfing down, flying up and surfing down, over and over on the fast-moving river. Finally he hauls himself out on a low-hanging branch and sits there, drying in the sun, quacking with satisfaction.
Tag: habitat
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sailor way
By the river new wildflowers are now growing, the seasons progress with colour and line. Some of them are upright prongs of dark pink clovers and some, I suspect from the shape, might be buttercups. Buttercups are famous! I’ve read about them since I was a little girl, in English novels. But I think I’ve never seen one. Let alone the swards of white spear-flowers populating the nearby woods, which travel in a carpet as far as the eye can discern under trees…. On the river a lady duck surfs as lady ducks did on the swift green current with their husbands, three weeks ago. This one has babies aboard. They clutter her back, five dark brown bobbing heads, and she carries them smoothly and the water carries all of them, as time carries all of us, long may it be so if our enterprises and selfishness have not too deeply uncluttered the lifeless oceans and cluttered up the air and clogged with metals the water. Sail away, duck mum, smooth like a promise and find a better, greener place.
