A few days ago, I noticed a nest on the ground on the little island in the middle of our backyard pond. Two days later, I saw that the nest had been disturbed and no sign of the eggs remained. I suspected a fox or a raccoon had found them. Then, this morning, the nest had been remade and no less than five eggs were in it. A female mallard cruised the pond and reluctantly flew off when one of the dogs made a move toward her. Claire tells me that ducks will lay eggs over several days, then finally, when they have enough, they will sit on them all to get things going. We'll see if Mama Duck keeps her appointment with her little ones, despite treacherous predators and domestic canines.
The lesson? Mothering may be intentional or instinctive, but once you are on the path, it becomes a primal drive that persists against ridiculous odds, against tragic realities. Protecting our young at their most vulnerable is only the raw beginning. If you're a duck, maybe the job ends with the fledging. If you're a person, you never stop wondering if they're safe and well. Never.
It's a special day when I have conversations with two of my grown children. Claire is back in Scotland after her travels to Africa, Amsterdam, Asia and Australia, now pondering her next adventure. She is mindful of the great gift of choice she has about where to live, work and learn, one that not everyone is blessed with. Evan is doing fine, currently exploring visual arts, especially where the analog idea meets the digital tool.
Thanks to the magic of text messaging, I was able to wish Claire a happy day today, and hear back from her that she just enjoyed a lovely dinner at the Singapore Zoo and is about to go on their night safari. I can imagine that will particularly please her, as she was so thrilled with last month's trip to Zimbabwe.
The two-week work marathon in Saint John is over and I fly and drive back home starting this morning. It was the most intensely demanding piece of work I have done in a long while, but also one of the most intellectually satisfying -- boy you don't get to say that very often about a job! I was part of a team sitting around a conference table day after day thinking out loud about how to do things within a certain domain, then coming up with an accurate process description that people could use. The work isn't over, and I'll continue with the team for several weeks, but I doubt that we'll approach the great synergy we had in that room. But that was the point of going at it for these two weeks, to give us all a running start.
I get two truffles each evening as part of the turn-down service in the hotel and I'm finding it a struggle to eat them all. I really make an effort to keep up, but usually I've just returned from a restaurant meal, which is more substantial than an at-home dinner. There they are, demanding not to be wasted. Tomorrow is my last day here on this trip and it has been very successful, but intense, with full long days spent in the office and little energy left in the evenings to do much more than collapse in front of the TV and nibble the chocolate. I made serious, but flawed, efforts to knit for several nights, then gave up entirely and unravelled several rows of a challenging sock to start from scratch. I'm ten rows into the sock redux and so far, so good. A bonus last night was a good view of the lunar eclipse from the hotel window. With some luck within the next 48 hours, I'll be back home.
