We didn’t know beautiful Grant was a girl.  And once they’ve got a name, well, you can’t change it.  Homely Spike, with his pointed topknot, was a cinch to name.  They were just three day old ducklings when we brought them home from the Barnstable County Fair, peeping if they couldn’t see my face at the top of their box.  It affected me so deeply I kept checking to see if I was lactating.

Now, six years later, after many joys and heartbreaks in their lives, they remain inseparable. 

I used to worry at night when they were in their coop, so I hooked up a baby monitor.  “Was that a normal quack?” I’d wake my husband, Bob, to ask.

We’d often hear babies crying because it transmitted sounds from other monitors in the neighborhood.  Conversely, what do you think nearby mothers heard on their monitors?  I pictured women looking frantically under the cradle for a duck, so I went door-to-door and explained.

One time Grant couldn’t walk.  I called a vet.

“Her name and color?” the receptionist asked. 

“You need identifying information?  Don’t you think you’ll know which one in the waiting room is a duck?”

Grant’s hip was broken and she needed to stay inside.  It wasn’t easy making business calls with a duck quacking, and even harder answering, “It’s my duck,” to callers asking about the noise.  Spike pined away, pacing by the back door making his only sound - raspy squeaks.  Grant called out, “Quack!” to each of his squeaks.  Now she limps.  And she gets Tums (for the calcium) while she’s laying eggs.  Which brings me to phase two of duckdom.

We let her nest.  (Bob eats her eggs, but I can’t.  They’re warm when they come out.  Don’t ask me more about this.)

Grant roosted outside the coop in a large chicken-wired area and even during heavy rains, she’d sit.  “We have to help her,” I finally said after a month.  “Who knows if the eggs are even viable?  After all, Grant’s no spring chicken.”

Bob planned to take an egg and check it under a light.  While crouched down, he turned back to me, and with a look of awe I’ll never forget, whispered, “There’s a baby!” 

Under Grant’s breast was a tiny Spike/Grant combo - his bill the size of a dime.  Then, my usual response to emergency kicked in.

“What do we do now?”  I flailed around the pen.

Five babies later, I was once again holding a box of ducklings while Bob fastened a heat lamp.  It was too cold for them to sleep outside.  We named them military letters: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo and Foxtrot.

I went back to Grant and her last egg.  The shell was cracked.  I could see it opening a little wider with each breath from inside.  Finally, the duckling grew too tired to try.  So Grant, with boundless maternal instinct, ate away the shell so her baby could get out.  That was Golf.

Golf spent the first hour of his life in my hand, where he took his first drink from a drop of water on my finger.

And so, through my ducks, I’ve learned about romantic love and motherhood and illness and renewal and sadly, even death.

On quiet mornings when I weed the garden, trying to stop nature from encroaching on my spinach, the ducks, hoping for squash borers, follow behind me.  And when emotional darkness tries to stake a claim, I remind myself . . . that I wouldn’t have to weed, were it not for the lovely spinach.  There’d be no awful borers, were there not delectable squash.  And poor Spike wouldn’t need to chase every male bird from his village, were it not for his life-long mate Grant.