When I looked out the front room window this week I was amazed. There was a big Mallard duck and his wife or girlfriend standing on the lawn looking into the picture window.

I figured they belonged to some farmer who owned them and they were hungry because he had not fed them.

I opened the door and stepped outside. I figured they would fly away but instead they waddled over and stood by my feet. The little female fluttered her eyelashes and her boyfriend boldly moved forward and waggled his tail feathers like he would on greeting an old friend.

I was puzzled. We get a lot of squirrels and blue jays, some geese, some Hummel birds (Elsbeth was born and raised in Germany) and some woodpeckers but we never see a duck.

In the '60s we lived at the headwaters of Salmon Creek (near Schick Shadel hospital in Burien. We had some wild ducks that loved to wallow and flutter in a Boeing surplus aluminum tub we filled with water.

We named one friendly mallard Dewey Thoreau. It became quite domesticated.

Sometimes he even went riding as a passenger under the arm of number-two son Ken as he trotted his pet quarter horse around the front yard.

One day he must have heard the irresistible call of nature and disappeared into the wild blue yonder.

Not bothering to say thanks or kiss my tail feathers, he disappeared.
We were a little put off but he was probably lonely for one of his kind to waddle with.

So, we were duckless and made do with a female kitten that we found in Beth's back seat when she left her car parked in our dentist's lot next door. Finding a window open like a big cavity, someone deposited the wretched little feline in the back seat.

We found it when Elsbeth got home later.

Elsbeth does okay with ducks but she is allergic to cats so she placed the furry little foundling in our garage where the kids found it and fed it and not surprising it grew feral and left us for the outside world. We were catless.

Strangely, a year or so later, we were walking the sandy stretch which one day would become Seahurst Beach when we noted a gaggle of mallards meandering on the beach and, hard to believe, one came over to chat with us.

We were astounded when he let us pick him up and hold him. Elsbeth insisted it was Thoreau and wanted to bring him home but we decided he would just take off again when some fine feathered, bouncy babe would fly by and waggle her tail and off he'd go.