Nothing beats the smell of fresh java when you return from the frozen yard, snow speckling your flannel robe, baby icicles tucked inside your boots.* As the rest of suburbia sleeps in or strokes the NY Post via iPad, you were dutifully standing knee-deep in the chilly white stuff, unraveling a frozen release cable on the coop door and sloshing water into bowls for patient poultry.
What are you, nuts?!
Okay, maybe a little crazy. Crazy about the special stillness when SUVs rest in pre-dawn driveways. Before snow-blowers and salt trucks and road plows rupture the post-storm silence. When the sky, etched in tree limbs, ripples quietly from purple-orange to gray-blue.
So, nuts? Perhaps. But you’ll take ducks over Page Six any morning.
Anyone seen the coop?
*Little House in Suburbia-style.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
What the Ducks! 
ducks are cool beings yes.
thanks
so much more than i realized before we got them!
Same here, and no, I’m not as tough as ducks.
Ha, that’s interesting. You read the title as “tough as ducks” which is an even truer thing. They *are* tough/strong/resilient but also smart/lovable/funny. Not bad role models at all!
The ducks seem to be enjoying their morning feed. Am I tough enough for ducks? May be. They were once considered long ago.
Even suburban farming is tougher than I thought–but so worth it!!!