Ducks In The Pond Quotes

Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will's unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire.

Mornings at Blackwater For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

There's an old saying in the Two Rivers" Rand said dryly. "'The louder a man tells you he's honest, the harder you must hold on to your purse.'" Another said, "The fox often offers to give the duck its pond.

I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.

It had been June, the bright hot summer of 1937, and with the curtains thrown back the bedroom had been full of sunlight, sunlight and her and Will's children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews- Cecy's blue eyed boys, tall and handsome, and Gideon and Sophie's two girls- and those who were as close as family: Charlotte, white- haired and upright, and the Fairchild sons and daughters with their curling red hair like Henry's had once been. The children had spoken fondly of the way he had always loved their mother, fiercely and devotedly, the way he had never had eyes for anyone else, and how their parents had set the model for the sort of love they hoped to find in their own lives. They spoke of his regard for books, and how he had taught them all to love them too, to respect the printed page and cherish the stories that those pages held. They spoke of the way he still cursed in Welsh when he dropped something, though he rarely used the language otherwise, and of the fact that though his prose was excellent- he had written several histories of the Shadowhunters when he's retired that had been very well respected- his poetry had always been awful, though that never stopped him from reciting it. Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will's unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire. Their grandchildren had reminded him of the song about demon pox he had taught them- when they were much too young, Tessa had always thought- and that they had all memorized. They sang it all together and out of tune, scandalizing Sophie. With tears running down her face, Cecily had reminded him of the moment at her wedding to Gabriel when he had delivered a beautiful speech praising the groom, at the end of which he had announced, "Dear God, I thought she was marrying Gideon. I take it all back," thus vexing not only Cecily and Gabriel but Sophie as well- and Will, though too tired to laugh, had smiled at his sister and squeezed her hand. They had all laughed about his habit of taking Tessa on romantic "holidays" to places from Gothic novels, including the hideous moor where someone had died, a drafty castle with a ghost in it, and of course the square in Paris in which he had decided Sydney Carton had been guillotined, where Will had horrified passerby by shouting "I can see the blood on the cobblestones!" in French.

And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself—the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond—but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there. Used to be he was one of the kids listening, one of the kids who missed everything, but now, since college, since Kate, he was in the stories.

Don't forget that in pushing policemen into duck ponds the follow through is everything.

I love how golf courses have water hazards. But the ponds feel empty without ducks. I'd like to start a business renting my ducks out to country clubs.

Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system... They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession...

What did you think of him?" Cade asked. "Give me some credit," Zach said. "Guy’s more full of shit than a duck pond.

You don't need a vacation. You just need to dig a pond on your land and buy some ducks, and then you can enjoy moments of escapism without ever leaving your property.

But I like sleepy. I like nothing-ever-happens. I buy the same chocolate bar from the same shop every day, next to our village pond with its minimalist duck population of three, and then I check the Holksea village newsletter with no news in it. It’s comforting. I can wrap my whole life up in a blanket.

I am the Mister Rogers Bannister of swimming coaches for ducks. My services are available in underwater vending machines in ponds all across The Ozarks.

I didna see anything. Sorry.’ ‘You don’t get it.’ She wishes she could move through the world like Billy, the way a duck crosses a pond, without thinking what’s beneath it.

Sometimes my kitchen sink doubles as a duck pond. Problem is, I can't exactly move my diving board, so I have to relocate Greg Louganis Hour to another slot, like one on the toaster.

The park was a scruffy patch of grass, muddy in winter and dusty in summer, set about with a few dozen trees, a bandstand, and a pond on which swam a family of depraved and malevolent ducks.

The Bostonians are very well in their way. Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good. Their Common is no common thing - and the duck pond might answer - if its answer could be heard for the frogs.

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT.—B. TRAVEN. . . .

I just pooped out a duck pond. The guy in the stall next to me in the Walmart bathroom was probably thinking, "What's with all the quacking?

Ducks swim in water. That's obvious, but do you know why they swim in water? Because I don't keep their pond stocked full of vodka.

I pour my morning coffee like ducks splash in a pond. Is an extended blink a micro nap? That's the thought that crosses my mind when I drive like Helen Keller.

You make me happy. The ducks in the pond make me happy. The clear skies, the calm sea, the lasting peace. All of this makes me happy.

Like That" Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night, with no moon and no town anywhere and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in the ditch. Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty water blurting from the faucet in the kitchen, leaking down through the floorboards to hot cement. Do it without asking, without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery’s shut down and the watchman’s slumped asleep before his small TV showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways, while the thieves slice through the fence with steel clippers. Love me when you can’t find a decent restaurant open anywhere, when you’re alone in a glaring diner with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are greasy and your hash browns underdone. Snick the buttons off the front of my dress and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just beneath the surface, their cold fins waving. Love me on the hood of a truck no one’s driven in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers; and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat, while turtles drag their bellies through slick mud, through the footprints of coots and ducks. Do it when no one’s looking, when the riots begin and the planes open up, when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the pedal sinks to the floor, while someone hurls a plate against the wall and picks up another, love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak, when you don’t believe in anything, listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down with me and close your eyes, the road curves here, I’m cranking up the radio and we’re going, we won’t turn back as long as you love me, as long as you keep on doing it exactly like that.

Music anchors us to a time and place, rooted with feelings, and is invisible liquid nostalgia that flows through our ears directly into our hearts (where our memories are stored). What song was playing when you first thought about stealing a duck out of a park pond?

Dust off your dancing shoes, the ones with wheels attached, because I’ve got banjo sounds FOR SALE. I’ve got boxes and boxes of the stuff labeled “Sexy," and to be sure nobody steals them, they are rubber and waterproof and I store them all on the bottom of my duck pond.

You're in for it this time,' she said. 'Father's been looking for you all afternoon, He's just got off the telephone with Constable Linnet, in the village. I must say he seemed rather dissapointed to hear that they hadn't fished your soggy little corpse out of the duck pond.

I say a stream leading into a pond, where we can have swans and ducks and absolutely no geese, and we’ll live very happily, two old-maid sisters. I do think we should have cats, a great many of them. They won’t go after the ducks, will they?” “We’ll have cats that are afraid of ducks,

Liza Hempstock, who had been Bod's friend for the last six years, was different in another way; she was less likely to be there for him when Bod went down to the nettle patch to see her, and on the rare occasions when she was, she would be short-tempered, argumentative and often downright rude. Bod talked to Mr Owens about this, and after a few moments' reflection, his father said, "It's just women, I reckon. She liked you as a boy, probably isn't sure who you are now you're a young man. I used to play with one little girl down by the duck pond every day until she turned about your age, and then she threw an apple at my head and did not say another word to me until I was seventeen." Mrs Owens stiffened. "It was a pear I threw," she said, tartly, "and I was talking to you again soon enough, for we danced a measure at your cousin Ned's wedding, and that was but two days after your sixteenth birthday." Mr Owens said, "Of course you are right, my dear." He winked at Bod, to tell him that it was none of it serious. And then mouthed "Seventeen" to show that, really, it was.

Flint's pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; — so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed — him all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will’s unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire. Their

bourguinon

Pools are duck ponds for people. I swim like a mallard in flight.

My ducks have trumpets for beaks. I do NOT farm the way liquid jazz would fill up an elevator and turn it into an ascending pond.

like trying to wrangle a pond full of baby ducks that were constantly squawking at, swimming circles around, and trying to drown me, all at the same time. Quack, quack, quack.

He was clearly in love with Amber too, and this time it wasn't the usual water off the back of the duck. Instead, the duck, wounded by a hunter and bewildered because half its head had been shot way, and was still tottering about on its webby feet by the side of the pond. From the one side it looked like a duck usually looks. From the other, it was a different story.

Adam,' I say, 'had good times and he had bad times.' I pause here and glance at Nana, see that she is crying silently, the way I cried at the duck pond in the park. I was going to say something more about the bad times- how Adam's bad times were different from most people's, and that I'll never really understand them. But now that I see Nana's tears, see her start to reach for Papa's hand, then pull back and fold her hands in her lap again- now that I see Nana, I change my mind. I think we should remember that Adam was one of those people who could lift the corners of our universe,' I say. I clear my throat. 'Thank you.' As I slide into our pew I realize I feel older. I think of Janet and Nancy and find that nonw I can brush them away. And I understand that Adam and I are not as alike as I had thought. I remembered the tortured look on Adam's face the night of the Ferris wheel and the look of happiness, happiness, and realize that Adam's decision to take his life was not made easily. It took a certain kind of courage. Just not the kind of courage I chose. I settle between Mom and Dad, and they take my hands and smmile at me. No tears. I squeeze their hands. ~pgs 177-178; Hattie on life

What I decided to do in the end was lie in bed as long as I wanted to and then go to Central Park and spend the day lying in the grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded wilderness.

Sinking, sinking, drinking water. When everyone in the village was fasting a long month,when not a grain, not a drop of water passed between the parched lips of any able-bodied man, woman or child over the age of ten, when the sun was hotter than the cooking pot and dusk was just a febrile wish, the hypocrite went down to the pond to duck his head, to dive and sink, to drink and sink a little lower. p. 105

What I decided to do in the end was to lie in bed as long as I wanted to and then go to Central park and spend the day long in the grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded wilderness.

A cloud is a floating pond, and since ducks are birds that can both fly and swim, I’d love to watch them splash around in the air. I’ve only seen it one time, and unfortunately I was asleep when it happened.

The pond lay to the south of the house. To get there you went out the back entrance, and down the narrow twisting path, pushing past the overgrown bracken that, in the early autumn, would still be blocking your way. Or if there were no guardians around, you could take a short cut through the rhubarb patch. Anyway, once you came out to the pond, you’d find a tranquil atmosphere waiting, with ducks and bulrushes and pond-weed.

A pond is just a giant bowl of Rain Soup. BearPaw Duck Farm has one that's one quarter full, or three quarters empty, depending on if you are a realist or a realist. I myself am a realist, which is like a pessimist's pessimist.

In Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 competition Peter and the Wolf, the little bird looked down at the duck: ‘What kind of bird are you if you can’t fly?’ said he. To this the duck replied: ‘What kind of bird are you if you can’t swim?’ and dived into the pond.

I sell yawns. Buy one and someone else gets one FREE. But be careful—they’re contagious. They should only be used in the confines of political discourse. (Yawns represent choking hazards for ducks, and should be kept away from ponds and other swimming areas.)

toward the small pond that he had seen before. The walls of fire ended there. An instant later the remains of the cottage exploded. He ducked and rolled again from the concussive force, almost pitching into the right side of the wall of fire. He rose and redoubled his efforts, thinking that he would reach the water. Water was a great antidote to fire. But as he neared the edge of the pond, something struck him. No scum. No algae on the surface although the ground around was full of it. What could kill green scum? And why was he being forced to run right toward the one thing that could possibly save him? Robie tossed his gun over the top of the wall of flames, pulled off his jacket, covered his head and hands with it, and threw himself through the wall of flames on the left side.

He photographed it, but it was kind of hard to make it out, like those 3D pictures I just can’t do, Duck Family Rescued From Pool, the fact that the Ackroyds kept finding dead field mice in their little pond, the fact that they came to drink and fell in and couldn’t get out, the fact that they should’ve put in some little mouse stairs.

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT.—B. TRAVEN.… Charles BowdenBlood Orchid     

Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce's forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce's case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I'm sunk into the pond of what she is saying, as if I'm some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head.

When you're a kid, you think you're going to have this deep well of time with your parents when you grow up and you're all on equal footing. When I had kids of my own, I thought that time would come when my kids grew up and I had a little more freedom. I imagined myself as a fifty-year-old woman, strolling around the duck pond with my eighty-year-old dad. I might have looped my arm through his. Now I knew, this was not to be.

Sometimes Raymond wonders what it is like to be a duck: What is it like to have a facial expression so frozen that no one, not even another duck, can tell if you are in pain? It must be safe in one way, but then sooner or later the hunters come along and say to each other:"Hey, look at those birds out there, bobbing on the pond. We can shoot them because they can't feel emotion." But that's not true, Raymond thinks. Not even a little bit.

The results of these [investment] companies in some ways resemble the activity of a duck sitting on a pond. When the water (the market) rises, the duck rises; when it falls, back goes the duck. … I think the duck can only take the credit (or blame) for his own activities. The rise and fall of the lake is hardly something for him to quack about. The water level has been of great importance to BPL’s performance … however, we have also occasionally flapped our wings.”5 While

There was no sort of change from dawn to sunset. My heart was heavy for all those whom I had lost. It seemed to me that life was but a sequence of tender ties, formed only to be ruptured, and leave the torn heart aching. I missed, moreover, the glad, sweet, summer season in the open air; the freedom of the old fruit gardens and flower-covered ways; the homely, happy sounds of all the stirring bees and chirming birds, of the ducks in the dark cool pond, and the lowing cattle in the poplarbelted meadows.

The weather was dazzling- a sunny Nova Scotia May day. We walked through the huge iron gates into the Public Gardens and ate our sandwiches and apples beside the duck pond. I kicked off my rubber boots and wiggled my toes in the sun as I watched the swans and yellow ducklings. The Gardens were immense, full of massive and intricate flowerbeds, winding paths, and strange exotic trees. There were statues, a splashing fountain, an elaborate round bandstand, and a little river with a curved bridge over it. Lovers strolled arm and arm, and children shrieked with laughter as they chased the pigeons.

Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT.—B. TRAVEN.… Charles Bowden Blood Orchid

Tom, will you let me love you in your restaurant? i will let you make me a sandwich of your invention and i will eat it and call it a carolyn sandwich. then you will kiss my lips and taste the mayonnaise and that is how you shall love me in my restaurant. Tom, will you come up to my empty beige apartment and help me set up my daybed? yes, and i will put the screws in loosely so that when we move on it, later, it will rock like a cradle and then you will know you are my baby Tom, I am sitting on my dirt bike on the deck. Will you come out from the kitchen and watch the people with me? yes, and then we will race to your bedroom. i will win and we will tangle up on your comforter while the sweat rains from your stomachs and foreheads. Tom, the stars are sitting in tonight like gumball gems in a little girl’s jewlery box. Later can we walk to the duck pond? yes, and we can even go the long way past the jungle gym. i will push you on the swing, but promise me you’ll hold tight. if you fall i might disappear. Tom, can we make a baby together? I want to be a big pregnant woman with a loved face and give you a squalling red daughter. no, but i will come inside you and you will be my daughter Tom, will you stay the night with me and sleep so close that we are one person, no, but i will lay down on your sheets and taste you. there will be feathers of you on my tongue and then I will never forget you Tom, when we are in line at the convenience store can I put my hands in your back pockets and my lips and nose in your baseball shirt and feel the crook of your shoulder blade? no, but later you can lay against me and almost touch me and when i go i will leave my shirt for you to sleep in so that always at night you will be pressed up against the thought of me. Tom, if I weep and want to wait until you need me will you promise that someday you will need me? no, but i will sit in silence while you rage. you can knock the chairs down any mountain. i will always be the same and you will always wait. Tom, will you climb on top of the dumpster and steal the sun for me? It’s just hanging there and I want it. no, it will burn my fingers. no one can have the sun: it’s on loan from god. but i will draw a picture of it and send it to you from richmond and then you can smooth out the paper and you will have a piece of me as well as the sun Tom, it’s so hot here, and I think I’m being born. Will you come back from Richmond and baptise me with sex and cool water? i will come back from richmond. i will smooth the damp spiky hairs from the back of your wet neck and then i will lick the salt off it. then i will leave Tom, Richmond is so far away. How will I know how you love me? i have left you. that is how you will know

Certain words, certain expressions. Things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I hate you.’ They’re big traps for actors. They can tempt you away from the connection you’ve developed with your partner and lead you into swamplands of clichéd performing. ‘Love’ and ‘hate’ are powerful words, and for some reason, we feel like we must fulfill them—and other words like them—whenever we say them. But we don’t have to.” Bill turns to Adam. “Actors hit that line—‘you know I’m absolutely crazy about you. Don’t you?’—and go all kablooey. Your head’s saying, ‘How can I not say a line like that without letting love swim into the duck pond? But inside you’re saying, ‘To hell will love! This girl’s really pissed me off, breaking off an important date like that.’ Follow your true inner response. It will never lead you astray. You’ll be bubbling up with impatience and irritation and you’ll say a line like that and it’ll have new meaning. It’ll have your meaning. Remember: Bad actors consciously adjust their inner responses to what they think the lines of the text require. Good actors adjust the text to the inner emotional line created by their sensitized responses to the other actor.” Adam says, “I get it. I was trying to act the words.” Bill nods. “You were manipulating yourself, cutting off our real response in order to live up to what you thought the text demanded of you. But any line can mean anything, and come out of you in any way.

Okay, so we’re in here. Now what?” “Now, you hook a duck.” He grins and picks up a stick that has a wire hook on the end. He points to what can only be described as a fake pond in the middle of the stall with rubber duckies floating around it. “So, that’s it? I just use this stick and hook a duck on it.” “Well, yeah.” He gives me a stupid look. “It’s not as easy as it looks.” “Sure it’s not.” I snatch the stick from him. Liam leans against the edge of the fake pond and folds his arms, watching me. “Go on then. Hook a duck, Boston.” I chuckle, shaking my head. I put my bag on the floor and set Squishy on top of it. Then, I hover my stick over the water. I try to catch one of the little fuckers—I really do—but they’re moving a lot quicker than I realized, and they’re all bumping into each other, knocking the others away. I nearly catch one, but another bumps into it and knocks the fucker away from my hook. “Little bastard,” I hiss. Liam laughs. “You can’t call a duck a bastard.” “It’s not a real duck.” I give him a look. “Aha! Got one!” I proudly lift my stick with the duck hanging on the end of it. “So, now what?” “What do you mean, now what?” “I mean, now what happens?” “Nothing. That’s it. Well, you win a prize, but considering that we broke in here, taking a prize would be stealing.” “Oh.” I take the duck off the stick, stand the stick against the pond, and set the duck on the small ledge below. “Well, it just feels kind of…anticlimactic now.” I lean against the pond next to him. “Anticlimactic, huh? How about I make you feel climactic?

He went to look closely at the painting, which portrayed a parade of fat white geese strolling past the doorway of a cottage. "Someday I'll be able to afford real art," Garrett said, coming to stand beside him. "In the meantime, we'll have to make do with this." Ethan's attention was drawn to the tiny initials in the corner of the work: G.G. A slow smile broke over his face. "You painted it?" "Art class, at boarding school," she admitted. "I wasn't bad at sketching, but the only subject I could manage to paint adequately was geese. At one point I tried to expand my repertoire to ducks, but those earned lower marks, so it was back to geese after that." Ethan smiled, imagining her as a studious schoolgirl with long braids. The light of a glass-globe parlor lamp slid across the tidy pinned-up weight of her hair, bringing out gleams of red and gold. He'd never seen anything like her skin, fine and powerless, with a faint glow like a blush-colored garden rose. "What gave you the idea to paint geese in the first place?" he asked. "There was a goose pond across from the school," Garrett said, staring absently at the picture. "Sometimes I saw Miss Primrose at the front windows, watching with binoculars. One day I dared to ask her what she found so interesting about geese, and she told me they had a capacity for attachment and grief that rivaled humans. They mated for life, she said. If a goose was injured, the gander would stay with her even if the rest of the flock was flying south. When one of a mated pair died, the other would lose its appetite and go off to mourn in solitude.

But the psychological change accompanying these technologies is more subtle, and perhaps more important. Consciously and unconsciously, we have gradually grown accustomed to experiencing the world through disembodied machines and instruments. As I stood in line to board an airplane recently, the young woman in front of me was primping in her mirror—straightening her hair, putting on lipstick, patting her checks with blush—a female ritual that has been repeated for several thousand years. In this case, however, her “mirror” was an iPhone in video mode, pointed at herself, and she was reacting to a digitized image of herself. I take walks in a federally protected wildlife preserve near my home in Massachusetts. A dirt trail winds for a mile around a lake teeming with beavers and fish, wild ducks and geese, aquatic frogs. Bulrushes and cattails wrap the perimeter of the pond, water lilies float here and there, rippling when a fish goes by. In the winter, the air is crisp and sharp, in the summer soft and aromatic. And a thick silence lies across the park, broken only by the honking of geese and the croaking of frogs. It is a place to smell, to see, to feel, to quietly let one’s mind wander where it wants. More and more commonly, I see people here talking on their cell phones as they walk around the trail. Their attention is focused not on the scene in front of them, but on a disembodied voice coming from a small box. And they are disembodied themselves. Where are their minds and bodies? Certainly not present in the park. Nor can they be located in the electromagnetic waves and digital signals flowing through cyberspace. Only their voices can be found at the other end of their conversations, in the offices and boardrooms and homes of the people they are talking to. They are attempting to be several places at once, like quantum waves. But I would argue that they are nowhere.

Last year I saw three migrating Canada geese flying low over the frozen duck pond where I stood. I heard a heart-stopping blast of speed before I saw them. They thundered across the pond, and back, and back again. I think of this now, and my brain vibrates to the blurred bastinado of feathered bone. “Our God shall come,” it says in a psalm for Advent, “and shall not keep silence; there shall go before him a consuming fire, and a mighty tempest shall be stirred up round about him.” It is the shock I remember. Not only does something come if you wait, but it pours over you like a waterfall, like a tidal wave. You wait in all naturalness without expectation or hope, emptied, translucent, and that which comes rocks and topples you; it will shear, loose, launch, winnow, grind. I have glutted on richness and welcome hyssop. This distant silver November sky, these sere branches of trees, shed, and bearing their pure and secret colors- this is the real world, not the world gilded and pearled. I stand under wiped skies directly, naked, without intercessors. Frost winds have lofted my body’s bones with all their restless sprints to an airborne raven’s glide. I am buoyed by a calm and effortless longing, an angled pitch of the will, like the set of the wings of the monarch which climbed a hill by falling still.

Around me umpteen birds are singing umpteen marvelous melodies, whistles and warbles and chirps and quavers cutting pitches high then sweep-swooping low, the pulchritudinous swimming pool sized pond glimmering picturesque in the lazy and hazy early afternoon sun. An attractive well-groomed mother duck- followed in a flawless and disciplined line by its ducklings like fluffy automatons - plies her trade alongside a young and jubilant hominid couple who, satisfactorily fulfilled to have settled and copulated once and to never again except on birthdays or anniversaries be carnal, play with their progeniture with proficiently prepared picnics loaded with an overkill of mother's home made tarts and buns and baskets of ham and cheese sandwiches; it was all sensationally Disney and dizzying and droll and not at all what this trip desired.

Ducking ponds where dogs chased ducks were popular amusements at parks, and sometimes, to increase the fun, an owl would be tied to the duck’s back, which caused it to dive in terror until one or both of the birds died.

He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…. —Psalm 23:2–3 (KJV) I grew up on a farm, doing chores after school and helping with garden or livestock during the summer. I worked hard as a farm wife and mother, and later held a demanding job with a church social service agency. Although I’m now retired, I’m still most comfortable with a never-ending to-do list. That’s why I said no when my husband, Don, asked me to attend a business conference with him. “There wouldn’t be anything for me to do,” I explained. “The resort brochure lists golf as the main draw, and I don’t play.” Don didn’t give up, so I reluctantly packed my suitcase and off we went. The hotel was surrounded by the golf course. There were four swimming pools, but the daytime temperatures were in the low sixties. For the first time in years I had nothing to do. No schedule, no phone calls, no meetings. To my great surprise, I enjoyed it! I read the entire newspaper and worked both crossword puzzles. I ate lunch outdoors amid an improbable but stunning landscape of palm trees and pines, grape hyacinths, honeysuckle, and a dozen types of cacti. Afternoons, I walked the easier trails, sat in the sunshine, and watched ducks paddle around a pond. Since there was nothing productive I could do, I didn’t feel guilty about not doing it. The best part, though, was the lesson I took home: God speaks most clearly when I don’t do; I simply be. Heavenly Father, thank You for teaching me to still my soul. —Penney Schwab Digging Deeper: Ps 46:10

Two of the cows, Mrs. Wiggins and Mrs. Wurzburger, were having a race across the pond and back. They splashed and floundered and snorted, making waves that would have upset the stoutest duck, while the animals on the bank cheered and shouted encouragement.

As the leaves fell, game became easier to get, ducks multiplied in the ponds and marshes, and life in general seemed brighter.

By the pond, what whiffs, what sniffs? The residue of stag and duck, Heron and otter, murky frog. Money smells, but not enough.

Now, don’t you be discouraged,” said Mrs. Wiggins. “My land, these animals may not care such a lot about working for the medal, but as soon as they know about how you feel they’ll work their heads off to find that boy. Here, you stop fretting about it and leave it to me.” When Mrs. Wiggins said something would happen, it pretty generally happened. She was big and clumsy, and she made more mistakes than you would believe one cow could make, but when anybody was in trouble he always came to Mrs. Wiggins, rather than her partner in the detective business, the brilliant but erratic Freddy, who was as likely as not to stop in the middle of tracking down a criminal case and start writing poetry or drawing plans for a new pigpen or doing any one of the thousand things to which he could turn his hand. And so the next day Mrs. Wiggins said to her sisters: “I’m going out to take a walk. I want to think about this boy.” She always went out for a walk when anything was bothering her, because she said she thought better when she was walking. But the real reason was that she couldn’t think at home, because her sisters talked all the time. And then of course she’d get to talking with them, and her thinking just wouldn’t get done. Very few people can talk and think at the same time, even on the same subject. Mrs. Wiggins walked down past the pond, and waved a hoof at Alice and Emma, but went on without speaking. The two ducks looked at each other. “Something on her mind,” said Alice. “She

The heron must be used to people, and yet it never lets you get too close. Draw parallel to it with the width of one of the marsh’s holding ponds between you, and it will duck its head, eyeing you with suspicion, then fly. I cannot approach the heron, certainly could never touch it; I can only look for it, entranced. This is how I understand the divine, and why I continue to seek it in the resolutely non-human world, with which we nonetheless recognize a numinous kinship. Sometimes, it will turn and lock eyes with you, lifting you out of yourself, changing everything. Other times, it will give you the side-eye and swoop away, leaving you longing for retreating beauty. You might not see it every single time you go looking, or where you expect to find it. No matter how common the experience, every time you stumble across mystery, or independent wild being, it is a surprise and a miracle. And every day, you can look." - Sara Amis, "A Daily Heron

Meditation on Wilderness In the evening’s orange and umber light, There comes vagrant ducks skidding on the pond. Together they veer inward to the reeds. The forest—aspen, oak, and pine—recedes, And the sky is smudged on the ridge beyond. There is more in my soul than in my sight. I would move to the other side of sound; I would be among the bears, keeping still, Not watching, waiting instead. I would dream, And in that old bewilderment would seem Whole in a beyond of dreams, primal will Drawn to the center of this dark surround. The sacred here emerges and abides. The day burns down, the hours dissolve in time; The bears parade the deeper continent As silences pervade the firmament, And wind wavers on the radiant rime. Here is the house where wilderness resides.

Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system…. They ought to practise leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession…

Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system…. They ought to practise leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession…

The louder a man tells you he’s honest, the harder you must hold on to your purse.’ ” Another said, “The fox often offers to give the duck its pond.

The park itself is marked by drought. Grass is dead. A large pond contains a mere puddle of muddy water, and a few scruffy ducks pad across its oily surface. Hardy trees persist here and there, but planting beds are home to cacti and a few swathes of invasive devil grass. Even in the city people are fighting against the painful truth of change. They don’t call it the climate crisis anymore, or global warming, or any other name that might have once have been used to urge positive action. Now, this was the norm.

Do/Do Not I sniff the blooming tiger lily, two tongues sprung open from one mouth. I poison the river unintentionally. I walk on the designated paths. I splice the mountain, its body and mouth gaping. I collect rainwater in a wheelbarrow. I line the whale’s belly with gifts until they rupture its stomach. I water the strawberries. Again I fill my gas tank with dead things, generations spun together until shiny. I feed the ducks fresh lettuce. I maneuver the dead squirrel on the road, mark the moment when creature becomes meat. I accept that my love is a poisonous flower, routinely fatal. I calculate the force of loving in each glittering death. All day on this land, in the deep forest, the electric greens and still-wet mud writhe with life. The pond gurgles and whispers. Everyone here knows to shudder when they see me coming. The mangos arrive unbruised at the grocery store. The wolves should start running.

One of the best places to see fall foliage in mid-October is the Duck Pond at Haverford College. You will definitely fall in love with autumn all over again!

That woman is one ducking stool short of a medieval pond.

This system makes a feedback loop between muscles, adrenaline, the thalamus of the brain, the anus and the larynx. Swelling the body and using the larynx to howl (muscle-flexing and noise) makes up the usual Domination signal among birds, reptiles, mammals and politicians. Study the speeches of Hitler and Ronald Reagan for further details, or just watch two ducks disputing territory in a pond.

Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp can be seen as a crab, a duck, a hand, a hat and much else. Utzon’s Sydney Opera House can be seen as shells, a flower, or sails. The soaring curves of Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York symbolise flight. The Archigram building concepts of the 1960s were designed as pods. Significantly, all these buildings were curvilinear. Curves ‘carry’ ideas from the natural world. Rectilinearity [stet] is a metaphor for intellectualism and the works of man. Renaissance architecture was a metaphor for reason and delight, restoring order after the chaos of the Middle Ages. Thoreau’s house, by Walden Pond, was a New Englander’s protest against materialism. Hundertwasser’s Viennese architecture is a metaphor for the reassertion of nature and emotion, after the brutalism of the twentieth century.

Magpies are well known for taunting larger animals, especially pets. They are probably just trying to drive off a perceived predator, but sometimes they seem to consciously trick other creatures with mean-spirited mind games. One BBC documentary featured a pet magpie that loved to torment two domestic dogs by imitating the alarm call of ducks on the pond outside his house; this would invariably send the poor canines scrambling outside to chase a nonexistent fox—because the ducks often called warnings to one another when the fox passed by. Another pair of magpies once repeatedly taunted a cat along a busy country road in Britain by perching in a tree, waiting for a break in traffic, and then flying down to the pavement to lure the kitty into the road; when a car approached, the birds would flutter up at the last second while the cat scrambled to avoid becoming roadkill.

When I looked at my reflection in the pond, I could see myself walk in an amusing gait, strutting, my shoulders thrown back, my stomach protruding like a well-fed duck on the way for a good swim with ducklings. I smiled. I would soon have my own duckling, and I would lead and protect like a mother duck.

always liked the symbolism of the lotus flower—rebirth, resurrection, revival. Its roots are in the mud at the bottom of ponds or rivers, and its petals emerge above the water. Every night they close up and duck beneath the surface, and every morning they rise up and open again. I got it at a time in my life when I needed to be reminded of my capacity for resilience. The lotus flower never gives up. It gives me strength when I need it.

van and running over to us, with furious expressions and a stream of curses. One of them grabs me just as I’m opening the back door and putting the puppies inside. And the other man snatches a cowering Maisie-Moo and reattaches the metal choke chain, which I can now see, to my horror, has a row of spikes around the inside

was

Duck Decoy Buckinghamshire In London at low tide it is still possible to find traces of Saxon fish and eel traps in the Thames, and near Brill in Buckinghamshire the National Trust has preserved what might be described as their avian equivalent. Today the word decoy has a wider meaning, but its origins are Dutch and originally described a type of wicker enclosure introduced to Britain from the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.[7] After landing on a lake or pond, waterfowl were encouraged into these enclosures by dogs specially trained for the purpose. The ruse works because ducks can become victims of their own curiosity. Faced with a likely predator, a duck will often keep it under observation rather than fly away. Mistaking a hunter’s dog for a fox, birds could thus be tricked into remaining on the water and gently led along the course of the decoy. Thereafter, the chances of escape would be reduced by narrowing the width of the enclosure as the birds paddled farther into it, and by giving it a curved shape that cut off the view of the pond. Once trapped in this way, the birds could be easily caught and killed; the meat all the better for being free of lead shot. As a source of nutrition, the decoys proved relatively cheap and efficient and soon hundreds were being constructed around the country. By the late nineteenth century, however, the number had slumped to a few dozen and today there are just four which, if they are used at all, play a role in trapping animals for ringing rather than for the pot. Hidden away in woodland, the Boarstall duck decoy is beautifully preserved and fairly typical of the late seventeenth century, although iron hoops suggest it might have been of above-average quality. With three separate enclosures or ‘pipes’, it includes hurdles behind which the decoyman could hide, perhaps throwing grain onto the surface of the water to further tempt the birds to their doom. Originally serving the kitchens of a now-vanished medieval manor house – to which the National Trust’s Boarstall Tower is the old gatehouse – this simple but ingenious device remained in use until the 1940s.

English witchcraft tests tended to favour the accuser. Ducking the accused witch in the village pond was one such test in which the guilty floated and the innocent sank or were pulled to safety by ropes. The accused could be weighed against the Bible. If the Bible was heavier the accused was a witch.

He was a duck sitting on a pond, and they raised the level of the pond.

Powdered Saxophone Music is now FOR SALE. (Duck pond not included.)

By felling poplars and willows to build dams, beavers single-handedly transform temperate forests into wetlands, which then attract and support a remarkable array of neighbors: pileated woodpeckers drilling nesting cavities into dead trees; wood ducks and Canada geese settling in abandoned beaver lodges; herons and kingfishers and swallows enjoying the benefits of the “artificial” pond, along with frogs, lizards, and other slow-water species like dragonflies, mussels, and aquatic beetles. As do those underwater colonies of coral, the beaver creates a platform that sustains an amazingly diverse assemblage of life.

Meanwhile, the duck's body entered the funnel's black terminal cloud and joined an indescribably melange of dead and dying.

When you see a duck in a pond, the part you see is peaceful, quiet, and serene. But under the surface, his legs are kicking away, churning water. That’s me.

That evening he put me up at the Glasshouse Mountains Motel, a few miles from the zoo. Steve was very chivalrous. I met his parents and had dinner with the whole family. I also got my first taste of Australian humor. That night at dinner, I poured myself what I thought was a nice glass of juice. The entire Irwin family sat quiet and straight-faced. As I took a big swig, it nearly choked me. That’s when I learned about cordial, which is supposed to be mixed with water. I had poured it full strength. We all had a good laugh. The next night Steve and I went to dinner in Caloundra, a nearby town. He took me to a resort that featured an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner--seafood banquet, my favorite. I loaded my plate high with prawns, crab, oysters, and everything I loved. I didn’t know it then, but Steve was a bit worried that I was going to eat more than he did. At one point a little piece of crab flicked onto the crook of my arm. I deftly reached down with my tongue and managed to grab it off my elbow and eat it. Suddenly I felt self-conscious. Steve was staring at me. He looked at me with such love in his eyes, and I thought, He’s going to say something wonderful. Steve leaned forward and said affectionately, “ Gosh, you aren’t ladylike at all.” I burst out laughing. Apparently I’d done the right thing. I reflected back on my dad’s advice: No matter what, always be yourself. And it sure had worked. As we left the restaurant, Steve said, “You know, I smell ducks.” We walked outside, and sure enough, there was a flock of beautiful ducks bobbing around on a pond. “Steve, you are the most amazing bushman I’ve ever met,” I said. Of course, the resort and the pond had been there for years, and Steve had known about the ducks for just as long. “I smell ducks” was a Crocodile Dundee trick that had nevertheless worked its magic on this naïve American girl. And then, suddenly, the weekend was over. Steve drove me back down to Brisbane. I had the biggest ache in my heart. I had fallen hard. As we said good-bye, he put his arms around me for the first time, and I felt all his strength and warmth in that embrace. But it was over. I was going back to my side of the world. I had no idea if I would ever see Steve Irwin again.

There are indeed ducks in Blackford Pond.” “On it,” muttered Isabel. “What?” “On the pond. There are ducks on the pond. There are fish in it.” Even as she spoke, Isabel had no idea why she was being so pedantic, and

Sorcery and Cecelia, Book 1 'Among other things, he [Thomas] insist he will perish if he cannot take me to Venice and watch me fall into a canal.' The Grand Tour ( Book 2; after Kate falls into a canal): When he was sure I was unharmed, Thomas indulged in a bit of scolding.'' I've seen you fall in the duck pond at St.James Park. I've done all mortal man can do to keep you from falling in the English Channel, I bring you all the way to Venice and this is how you thank me? You fall into a canal behind my back? Kate, you are a monster of inconsideration.

A bullet would perhaps be an unnecessarily severe form of punishment to mete out; but I confess I could excuse the man who was so far carried away by his righteous indignation as to duck the fellow in the nearest horse-pond.

stares into

Dolphins and whales evolved the ability to have only half of their brain sleep at a time, switching from one side of the brain to the other every hour or so. Similarly, the great frigatebird (Fregata minor) will fly over the ocean for months without landing, resorting to “unihemispheric sleep” while in flight. In ducks, unihemispheric sleep is used to guard against predators. When a flock of ducks are sleeping in a pond, those around the outer edge keep the half of their brain that looks outward awake, switching positions with those in the center of the flock as the night goes on.

What is your main reason for raising ducks? Is it for pets, eggs, meat, feathers, decoration, exhibition, insect and slug eradication, aquatic plant and algae control in ponds, or a combination of these and other aims?

Abby saved Mommy’s life in that duck pond, the fact that if she hadn’t gotten Mommy out of the pond, or if their mom hadn’t massaged Mommy’s arm every day for six months when she was a baby, Mommy might not have survived and gotten married and I might never have been born.

So we went for a stroll in Alumni Park, a grassy lawn in front of Pepperdine that overlooks the coast. Deer trickle down from the hills and rocky bluffs to graze there. The coral trees rise like watchtowers over a pond where fresh water reeds grow, providing a small refuge for ducks and wild birds. At night, a full moon leaves a trail on the ocean’s black waters, and the constant coastal breeze disturbs the tree limbs, sending their leaves into a continuous stirring.

I drove to Liberty Park, just south of downtown, and within minutes, Henry had his kite out and was urging LeBron James into the air. “He’s done this before,” I said in surprise. “Not in forever. I can’t remember the last time, actually,” Millie replied. “Is he doing it?” “Listen,” I said. “Can you hear it?” I listened with her, straining for a sound that would connect her to the visual. Then the kite dipped, caught the wind again, and lifted, making a soft, wop wop in the air, like laundry on a clothes line, flapping in the breeze. “I hear it!” “That’s Henry’s kite. He’s a natural.” “Will you help me get mine in the air? I could take off running, but that might be dangerous. I don’t want to run head first into the pond. There is a pond, isn’t there?” “Just run away from the sound of the ducks.