I've Held a Duck More than Once

Grandma and Grandpa S built a house in the early 1980s.

The custom California ranch had horizontal wood siding that was painted dirt brown with mud trim. It was the first one on a rural cul-de-sac in an area of Roseville, Calif., called Granite Bay. Beyond this new street was a dirt road. An actual dirt road that led to long and winding gravel driveways bordered by split-rail fences and oak trees. Personable horses that thought they were dogs greeted cars and whinnied hello as you weaved between potholes on your 10-speed.

Our narrow house stretched long, slicing through a sloping two-acre square that touched the new asphalt at the top, crossed a creek at the bottom and ended somewhere in a tumble of blackberry bushes and dry California oaks on the other side. Looking up the hill from back yard (on the tame side), the house towered like an office building, but from the road, my eyes were level with its gabled roof.

We moved in when I was six or seven. Auntie W would have been two or three. Auntie L wouldn't be born until another year or two, and Auntie H wouldn't arrive for five or six. Grandpa S killed a rattler with a 2-by-4 in the front yard on the first day. He held it up in front of his buddies like a prize.

I spent most of my childhood at Miners Meadows Court, riding horses, making treasure maps and throwing Barbie numerous parties. Most of the time, though, I played in the creek. Its level changed with the seasons, but in the late spring and during the summer it only came up to a first-grader's knees. It was lazy, too; perfect for catching crawdads or tadpoles with Auntie W and the other neighborhood girls and boys.

Sometimes beavers would stack hundreds of crooked oak branches right in front of the 3-foot waterfall that dumped the creek from our property into the yard next door. Grandpa S would grumble, pull on his camo-green rubber overalls and head down the hill clutching the wooden-handle rake he used to dismantle dams.

There were several consecutive springs that Grandma S drove to the local feed store to buy us girls a group of ducklings for Easter. First, we cared for them in a cage inside the cool garage. Then, we let them run around inside a low makeshift wire fence out in the yard like puppies. Later, we held them up and tossed them out, encouraging the teenage ducks to explore the creek and, eventually, fly away.

It was a happy feeling when one of us spotted them with their own babies the next year. I wonder how many generations of ducks have returned to that creek since then, more than two decades since the first group was introduced to it.

Do they quack stories like this to their children? Or, excuse me: wa-wa-wa-wa-wa. Yes, that's what the ducky says.