I was out walking the dogs early one Sunday morning when I saw something small in the middle of the road. It moved a little, veered to the side, then halted as if it expected someone to catch up. It was a duckling. Alone, no mother in sight. The dogs hadn’t noticed yet, and I quickly tied them to a post.
Two days after finding the duckling, I returned for pictures. I know the area well. It’s a block off the main road through town but looks like something out of a different era. Three years ago, when I moved here, its row of terraced houses appeared to be destitute, still standing but attracting nobody’s interest. You wondered if anyone lived in them and in what conditions of squalor. One after another, the houses have been repaired and prettied up. All but one are now lived in and cared for, with freshly painted woodwork and flowerpots beside the entrances. Shiny cars are parked in front. All it took was a bit of spit and polish, no major construction, for homes to emerge, softly glowing, from beneath a mantle of neglect.
Across the street, in a facing row of old stone structures, the change was more radical. An old stone stable and some jumbled outbuildings had been razed, the brambles uprooted, the field plowed smooth with work already underway to make a parking lot.
But describe even a thing you know well, and you are sure to skate over small but telling details. When writing about a place, I like to refresh my memory with photographs. That way I can say, for example, that exactly nine houses stood in the row, geraniums sat out front, a bench beside a door was newly varnished, and the cats—one gray, another calico, one black—were not scrawny so much as thin. When I’d hurried toward the duckling, though, had I cast an ominous shadow over it, or was the sun positioned so my shadow fell harmlessly to the side? My photographs answered my questions, but the feel of the day was different when I returned: a Tuesday not a Sunday, cars instead of silence, and the morning, not just beginning, crawling slowly out of night, as on that earlier day, but already something prodded from its lair.
I had cast no shadow over the duckling. Catching it had taken several tries. Not because it was difficult, exactly, but because you hesitate in that moment—your body unsure whether this is something one really does: pounce. But you do, and I did. A cat had been watching, though it slunk away when I moved in. Other cats, each a different color, crouched on the stoops or prowled in front of the row houses across the intersection. A black one stayed close to the tire of a car. I wondered if the duckling, somehow evading the cats, had come from one of those homes, but it was early—eight a.m.—too early to knock on doors. For a moment I forgot myself in a recollection of the children’s picture book, Are You My Mother?, in which a nestling flutters from its nest in search of its mother, inquiring of every animal and almost every object it meets, “Are you my mother?” I wasn’t about to go from house to house with a duckling in hand.
So I walked past the houses, nervous because my dogs were now out of sight, around the bend. I wanted to be relieved of the small creature, cupped between my two hands. It moved but didn’t struggle. I crossed over to an old, crumbling stone building—more ruin than home—thinking maybe there’d be signs of a coop, a pen, a mother duck to return the duckling to. No such luck.
A few steps farther along the road stood some other decrepit outbuildings and an old stone house in ruins. The house was a casa mariñana, a typical style of old farmhouse, with a pair of rooms on the ground floor used as stables for the animals, a deeply recessed area between them, open to the front, and above, the second floor with living quarters for the people. I made for the house. There, within the deep recess, I saw a man in a stained white T-shirt and khaki pants sitting on a folding chair, a tin plate on his lap, a knife in his hand that he was using to cut something. He had a bushy beard.
I approached, holding up the duckling, and asked, “What should I do with it?”
He looked up, squinting. “I don’t understand you,” he said loudly.
I tried again, different words, but got the same answer. Only when I stepped close enough that he could see what I was holding did something change. He reached out, touched the duckling, and nodded. “Un patetu,” he said, using the Asturian word.
“What can I do with it?”
“Keep it for yourself.”
“I don’t want it.”
But there was no further advice. He half-raised his hand, dismissively, then returned to his food, peering down at the plate. I stepped away from the alcove, back into the yard, and walked past the corner of the building, where I saw some bushes. Bushes had to be better than the open street. I tucked the duckling there. And then I left.
Two mornings later, I returned and took my photograph. Three, in fact: the row houses with two cats in front, the casa mariñana, and a road sign, not a stop but a yield. The sun was feeble behind clouds. A sun like that would have caused no shadow at all.
I saw no sign of the duckling. No sign of the man either. The folding chair was not a folding chair at all but a wooden chair typical of café-bars. The house was not a true casa mariñana but a variation, no second floor, just a rudimentary ground floor, recessed alcove, and a pitched roof. Plenty of cats though. One shows up in the picture. So that’s it: a trio of snapshots to help me remember what happened and what I thought I was doing when I chose to act—and then to walk away.
