The Ducky Story

When my sister and I were children, I would often tell her a story of a family with four children. There was an older sister, a brother, followed by fraternal twins. We called it The Ducky Story because at the beginning of the tale, the fraternal twins of the family capture and attempt to make a flock of wild ducks their pets. The rest of the story is about how they come to adopt or find their actual pets. These pets come to include a dog wreaking havoc in a hotel lobby on vacation, a horse, and a very friendly cat. I’ve often wanted to write the story down, but never got around to it. I’ve been wanting to try a different form of writing for a while, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Here is the first chapter of The Ducky Story. The goal is to publish a new chapter each week until the story concludes.

The Ducky Story

The White Family was an ordinary family by most measures. The family consisted of mom Mildred, dad Oscar, and four children. Violet was the oldest, followed by James, and then fraternal twins Lilly and Rose. This story is the story of this mostly ordinary family and their wonderful adventures.

Chapter 1: The Missing Ducks

The White family lived in the mountains of North Carolina. The house they lived in had been in the family since the early 1900s. The home technically had three floors, but only two were used by the family. The third floor was an old cellar that no one went into. Oscar would periodically say that he would eventually finish the basement, but would get distracted by the backyard garden, a stump that needed to be removed, or by whatever collegiate sports team from the University of Kentucky was having a successful season. He had graduated with his accounting degree from the University of Kentucky and then had moved to North Carolina for a job out of college. It was at this first job that he met Mildred. Mildred worked in the advertising department. They had been attending a Spanish class the company was offering after landing a major accounting client from Mexico. They had been paired on a group presentation for the class and had been together ever since.  She had grown up in the area, and her family all lived within ten miles of each other.

After they had met and gotten married, Mildred’s mother happened to have a vacant house. After months of renovations, the house was ready. The happy couple moved into the home and never left. The children’s bedrooms were on the top level, with the master bedroom on the main level.

On this particular day, Violet was listening to an audiobook in her room. She had taken her earbuds out to the bathroom and got a snack. As she climbed the stairs back to her room, she thought she heard a noise through the grate that allowed cool air to come up into the house from the cellar. She listened intently but heard nothing more. Once she had returned to her room, she sat in the window seat that looked out over the front yard. As she looked out over the front yard, she saw her sisters, Lilly and Rose, walking down the road, carrying what looked like heavy grocery bags. As they got closer, she noticed the paper bags had the local feed store’s logo. That’s odd, she thought. They didn’t have any animals that would require purchasing feed from the local feed store. She decided to investigate further.

She tiptoed out of her bedroom, stood right outside the door in the loft, and listened to what her sisters were saying as they came in the door. “We need to get the feed down to the basement before Mom gets back,” said Rose. Lilly sighed, “ Are you sure what we’re doing is a good idea?” Rose typically was the ringleader of the two. She had all the ideas, and Lilly would dutifully help her bring them to fruition. Rose was ready for her question: “ Of course, we’re not going to get into trouble, Mom and Dad are always saying we need to prove we’re responsible if we want to have a pet, we’re proving how responsible we can be”.  Violet was about to descend the stairs and ask her sisters what exactly they were doing to prove how responsible they were, but her mom walked through the door as her sisters came back up from the basement.

Mildred had gone to her bible study, and often, after returning, the five of them would go together to an activity. Mildred had decided to stay home after the twins were born. Sometimes she would take on freelance advertising work, but most of the time she was dedicated to being a full-time mom. Summer vacation had just started, and she was determined to make sure they spent quality time together as a family. “ Alright, everyone, we’re going to the local park before it gets too hot,” she shouted to the household.

James emerged from his room. He was dressed but looked like he had just woken up. James was the only child among the four who loved sleep the most. Mildred would brag that he slept through the night at four months and had been doing so ever since. After he had rubbed his sleep out of his eyes, his mind turned to the most immediate need: “ I’m hungry and haven’t eaten breakfast because I went back to sleep after I got dressed this morning”. Mildred rolled her eyes. “I’ll make you a peanut butter sandwich you can eat in the car on the way to the park. Everyone else, shoes on and in the car.” Twenty minutes later, after much nagging, they were all on their way to the park.

The park was not actually that far from the house. Mildred just liked to drive because she could pack lots of snacks, toys, and drinks. Upon arriving at the park, Mildred sat down on a bench with a book. Her current book is The Sunne in Splendour, a tale of the War of the Roses in England. Violet decided to walk around the pond while the twins were on the swings at the playground. James was busy scraping underneath the rocks in the stream that led to the pond. He would often put whatever sludge he’d collected on a slide to look at under the microscope that he had gotten for Christmas the previous year. Violet enjoyed her solo walks. Sometimes she would bring her audiobook, and other times she would do her best to identify the bird calls she heard as she walked. Today she was listening for birds. As she rounded the bend of the trail that circled the pond, it came into her view. She stared out at the placid expanse. She noticed a frog jumping into the water, and a goose swimming along. What she did not notice was the flock of ducks that were usually residents of the park. That’s funny, she thought, they were just here last week when we were here. As she finished the loop back at the playground, she saw that her sisters were now drawing in the dirt with sticks. She wandered over and sat down on a bench next to them.

“Have y’all noticed that there aren’t any more ducks in the pond?” The twins exchanged a telling glance. Rose shrugged her shoulders. “ Who knows why they left?” Lilly seemed to be very engrossed with her drawing in the dirt. Violet couldn’t tell if she was drawing a horse or a dog. Viole tilted her head and continued to ponder why the ducks had left the pond. “ Maybe they got eaten by a pack of coyotes, ” Dad just said that one of our neighbors had lost some chickens to coyotes a few weeks ago. I hope that the ducks are okay. Maybe they just flew away to a different pond”. Lilly finally looked up from drawing in the dirt, “ I’m sure the ducks are okay”. Mildred looked up from her books and looked at her watch. “Time to go home for lunch,” she shouted. Everyone piled back into the minivan for the three-minute drive home.

Upon arriving back at the house, everyone made turkey sandwiches and sat down to watch a movie. After much debate, Mildred picked The Wizard of Oz. The four children groaned. “ It’s a classic,” snapped Mildred. She continued, “ I’d also like to point out that if the four of you could’ve agreed on your own, I wouldn’t have had to pick after all.”  Movies in the middle of the day were a relatively rare occasion in the White household. Normally, after lunch during the summer, Mildred would take her children to the local pool. Today, she had a deadline for a commercial she was writing for a local tire store. Mildred loved being a mom, especially a stay-at-home mom. She hadn’t thought she’d enjoy being a mother without a career before having her first child, but here she was. She loved the little moments where she could see their growth, whether it was Lilly learning to ride a bike, Rose baking bread alone for the first time, James exclaiming with excitement over something he was seeing under his microscope and calling for her to come see, or Violet telling her about her most recent audiobook. As much as she loved staying at home, there were moments when she missed the intellectual stimulation of work. Brainstorming marketing campaigns with other adults, redesigning business cards for the partners of the accounting firm, heck, she even missed the conversations she’d have while waiting to make her cup of coffee at the Keurig machine in the break room at the office, and that’s why she would take up freelance work from time to time.

Today, she was facing a deadline, and a movie in the middle of the day was how she was going to get some alone time. The children had their drinks and snacks, the movie was on, and finally, she could escape to her office. “ Do not interrupt me unless there’s an emergency,” she stated emphatically, and with that, the kids were left to their own devices.

The Wizard of Oz was oddly more enjoyable than Violet had thought. She had concluded that Todo was being a brat for biting Mrs. Gulch, and Dorothy seemed oddly emotional and did not understand the severity of her dog’s actions. Violet had finished her popcorn and wanted another snack. She knew there was a baggie of peanut M&Ms somewhere in the snack cabinet. Upon further investigation, she discovered they were not in the snack cabinet. The next stop in her search for the candy was the pantry. The pantry backed up to the hallway, which contained the door to the unfinished basement/cellar. After about five minutes of digging through the pantry and an unfortunate incident that resulted in dry cereal being spilled on the floor, she had finally found the peanut M&Ms. After having cleaned up the dry cereal, put away the step stool, and put the cans of beans she had moved to make space for the step stool, Violet was ready to return to see what Dorothy and Todo were doing. As she was getting ready to close the door to the pantry, she heard the door to the basement open.

That’s odd, she thought, there’s nothing down there. What was even stranger was that she thought she heard quacking. “ No, you can’t come up,” she heard Lilly say. The door to the basement was closed quickly, and Lily padded back towards the television. Violet waited until her footsteps had receded down the hallway. After putting the candy in her pocket, she decided to investigate what was in the basement she had heard about. Opening the door, she slowly descended the steps into the basement. The basement was rather large, with a mostly open floor plan. Once she had reached the bottom of the stairs, her jaw dropped open at what lay in front of her. A kiddie pool filled with water had several ducks swimming in it and quacking. Once the ducks saw her, the ones who weren’t swimming came up to her quacking as if expecting food. Off in a corner, there were rubber feed containers on the ground. She recognized the ducks from the park pond. They were nearly all accounted for, minus one or two, she guessed. She thought back to how earlier in the day she had seen her siblings walking home with the feed. Now it made sense why the pond was duckless. Her attention was brought back to the basement and the incessant quacking at her feet. She turned around and ran back up the stairs. Not wanting any of the fouls to escape into the rest of the house, she squeezed herself through a crack in the door before closing it quickly. She took a deep breath. What was she going to do? Her mom was busy at work, and her dad was at work, too, and while she knew taking animals from a park was wrong, the ducks had been rather cute. After thinking some more, she decided the only thing to do in the meantime was to confront her sisters and come up with a game plan to get the ducks out of the house. After all, if she had found them in the basement, how long would it be before their parents would find them?