Another Day in the Country
Peas, please
© Another Day in the Country
Reluctantly, I got dressed and went outside to access the frost damage this morning.
This was it — the end of a season! The frost will have done its job, ending the cycle of reproduction in one fell swoop of cold arctic air.
If you’ve gardened as long as I have, you know what those plants that you’ve cherished and nurtured for months will look like — shriveled, limp, already dissolving into a never-ending circle of life.
As a gardener for several decades in California, where some years there is no killing frost, I used to almost wish for a good freeze — a leveler of all things green, like clearing off a plate, turning over a new leaf.
In that warmer climate, I was called upon to do trimming back and pulling up — to start anew in the spring. Myself. No Jack Frost that year.
As I examined the damage this morning, I was surprised.
The purple petunias in the wheelbarrow still were blooming — looking darker blue than ever. Don’t tell me they survived.
The daisies that we called “freeway daisies” in California were still alive and looking healthy in a pot I’d decorated for Halloween.
How did they make it, I wondered. Could a porch post hold enough heat to save them? Could all the foliage on the red dogwoods have sheltered them?
Who knows? They’ve made it through two nights of 20-degree weather, so I’ll put them on the back porch with all the other snowbirds that winter there, where miraculously it never really ever freezes unless the temperature is 15 below for a week.
Then, and only then, do I bring them all in the house for a few days, like a mother hen gathering her chicks.
I cleaned the back porch to honor the geraniums that were moving in for the winter. My sister always brings her foxtail ferns to winter there, too. That back porch looks like Florida even in a Kansas blizzard.
Right before the frost, I added water to the pond and invited my ducks to come have a bath.
They think it’s like visiting a spa and cavort around in 18 inches of water as if it were an Olympic pool, diving underwater, splashing water with their wings, shaking themselves with water flying in the sunlight filtering through the trees.
It’s a beautiful sight. I take another video.
The ducks climb out of the pond and stand in the sunlight, preening their feathers. Some days, after they are done, it looks as if someone ripped a hole in a down pillow and flung feathers all over the grass.
I sit watching the ducks, wondering how many feathers I would have in my hands if I gathered up all of them and, if I did this every time, how long it would take me to fill a pillow for the couch or one for the bed. Years!
So, I just sit and watch the ducks balance on one leg while the other foot fluffs feathers on the tops of their heads.
Duck gymnastics are amazing as they squirrel their necks around to reach every quarter of their body with an inquiring, ruffling, smoothing bill.
I need a brush, a hairdryer, my fingers, and products to do my hair. I’m so impressed with a duck’s dexterity.
Dandy, the all-black drake with iridescent feathers, comes over to where I’m sitting in a lawn chair, duck watching.
His voice is quiet in comparison to the duck girls who sound really raucous and annoying. He tips his head and says in a low voice, “quack quack quack, did you bring us some peas, please?”
“How did you know?” I ask him, laughing because I had brought frozen peas, a handful in my pocket. I wasn’t going to sit out here indefinitely, and the promise of peas is how I get them to come when called or go into the pen.
Can you smell them in my pocket, I wondered.
He probably can.
The ducks, after bathing and grooming, playing and splashing, drying themselves out, and diving back into the puddle to do it all over again would soon be bored with water acrobatics and would go hunting around the yard for anything interesting to eat.
In my zeal to keep them safe, I don’t want them wandering too far into the pasture beyond our yard, out in the open.
Insects are mostly gone, hiding, hibernating, or trying to get into my house.
Butterflies have flown. I found one perfect specimen, a monarch, already dead, on the sidewalk and brought it indoors, propping it up on the last of the last of the last flowers I’d picked.
That monarch will remind me of the glory days of summer on the coldest days this winter when I’m snowed in.
“OK, OK,” I say to Dandy. “I’ve got peas.”
And at the sound of that word coming out of my mouth, Daisy, Daffy, and the Duchess come running, chorusing, “Did anyone say ‘peas’?”
And here I am laughing with the lucky ducks as they speed-waddle ahead of me toward their pen, knowing full well, trusting, that I will throw them peas — wonderful, glorious, crispy, cold peas, on another day in the country.