fun at the pond

I am teaching my dear friend Dennis how to knit. We meet on Friday mornings at Sully's for wonderful food, truely superlative company, and a session of, "Through the door, around the back, through the window, and off jumps Jack!" He is persistent and therefore improving rapidly. I am trying to persuade him to join our next knitting group, or if not that, then the one after. He gets along with women better than any man I've ever known. At parties, Dennis used to wind up in the kitchen with the women, taklking politics and recipes, and I wound up in the livingroom with the guys telling dirty jokes. He would add a lot to our knit-alongs.

After we parted, I took myself down to the local wetlands. (What, you don't have a neighborhood wetland? Quelle bummer! Everyone oughta have a nearby swamp and duckerie.) At first, the only creature brave enough to approach me was a stolid little mallard hen.

When I began sharing a stale biscuit with her, the freeloading boyfriend showed up.

And then the big kids came around. A couple of Canadian Geese. By then, my stale biscuit was gone, and they became quite incensed, yelling and scolding me for wasting good food on the small fry. Pretty soon, another couple of Geese came around, and the two males spent a bit of time hissing and making snakey necks at one another. Then with raised wings and out thrust heads, they rushed at one another and tumbled into the pond, buffetting and biting. The females followed frantically honking and fluttering, and then it was over and the couples swam in different directions with many insulting tail twitches and a great deal of loud invective.

After they left, a nutria waddled out of the pond to see if there were any crumbs left. He was quite fearless and about the size of a very large cat - maybe 20 pounds or so. Nutria are a South American water rat, imported by someone with a notion of farming them for their pelts. Then the big fur boycot hit, so the idjit just realeased them into the wild. They quite like it here and do any ammount of damage to the riparian zones.

He obligingly showed me his big orange teeth. All the better to eat saplings with, my dear.