Not This Year

Snow off the nest - she won't be hatching ducklings this year

Snow gave up brooding a few days ago so she won’t be hatching ducklings, not this year. She still fluffs up like a brooding hen when I approach her. It would be nice to have a chat with her. “What went wrong, Snow?” Or how she feels about her eggs not hatching.

Gray is still on her nest. I’m hopeful she will succeed in hatching her eggs. Her nest was more defined when she started brooding and it is well hidden.

What does a duck think while she waits for her eggs to hatch? Does she spend most of the time sleeping? Or does she look down at the pond and wish she could spend the day swimming about?

Someday we will have figured out how brains work and our phones will be able to pick up the slightest electrical impulses any brain emits. All we will have to do is point our phone at a brain and understand what it is thinking. We won’t have to try and decipher a cat’s meow or a dog’s bark. Our phones will tell us exactly what our pets are thinking. Which means we’ll have to go about with special helmets that shield our brains from everyone eavesdropping on our thoughts. If we don’t when we walk into a store, the store will know instantly what we are wanting to buy, correlate it with our mood, and up the price of everything we want to the maximum amount we are willing to pay for it.

But it’s not something we need to worry about yet, at least not this year.

The future sounds bleak and dystopian. It can also be one of endless possibilities. Which way will we go? What is dystopian for some will be paradise for others, and vice versa.

The Loosestrife is in full bloom. From a small sprig, it has grown into a huge sprays of lovely yellow flowers. A Lysimachia there are many varieties of this genus. Though varieties of Lythrum are also called Loosestrife.

The name Lysimachia comes from the ancient king of Sicily, Lysimachus. He used a Loosestrife to calm a mad ox by feeding the plant to the ox. He must have been quite the character because historians report that Alexander the Great tossed him to a lion to punish him. But Lysimachus earned Alexander’s respect by killing the lion with his bare hands.