This past week has brought Dan and me some smiles along the way. As we read the obituary of Ray Heinen in the area papers, Dan recalled a funny incident that happened with Ray at Midland Co-op shortly after we moved to the Fulda area in March of 1970. Ray was the service manager there, and when Dan went to leave, his old green pickup refused to start. He went back inside and asked if someone could give him a “jump start”. Immediately Ray jumped on Dan’s back! It gave everyone there a good laugh, and Dan remembers Ray being a jovial guy who was good at his job. Good memories are one of the blessings of life, and there seems to be an abundance of them living in a rural area.
This week’s good weather has provided us time to do some yard work. One morning as we finished cleaning out around some of the plants by our house, Dan asked me if I had ever sat on the wrought iron bench that rests there. I said yes, and he proceeded to take a seat himself. No sooner had he sat down, and he immediately fell backwards, along with the bench tipping over! One of the legs totally disappeared into the rocks, and he had a dickens of a time trying to get up and off of that bench. It was pretty funny to watch, almost in slow motion. When we realized he wasn’t hurt, we laughed about it several times that day.
About 9:30 Friday morning, just as we were going to leave to get a load of seed corn, we heard a loud “crash”. After investigating all through the main floor, and finding nothing, I headed up the stairs. As I reached the landing at the top, I turned to look into the first bedroom. The floor was splattered with glass, and I thought a picture had fallen. As my eyes continued upward, just a foot off the carpet two beady eyes were staring at me in silence. Sitting behind a rocking chair was a duck. Yes, a duck. He was mostly black, quite large, with a ring around his neck. It was about the size of a Mallard, but darker in color, with a brown bill.
I hollered for Dan to come, all the while staying still in the hallway, not sure how to go toward this creature. The duck was calm, probably in a daze of sorts. As Dan went closer, into the bedroom and looked toward the north window, he couldn’t believe what he saw. The duck had flown through TWO sets of glass, leaving an 8-10 inch hole in both sets of windows. The crazy thing was that there was no blood, no feathers, and no poop left behind. This duck did not seemed to be injured in any way.
Dan picked up a few of the bigger pieces of glass from the floor, and also removed a couple larger chunks sticking out of the broken windows. During this time, the duck had disappeared under the bed. As Dan moved the bed sideways to try to somehow corner it, the animal suddenly flew into the air and back out from where he came! It all happened so quickly, but we did see that the underbelly had white feathers. As we looked out the shattered window, he was gone. We have not found a trace of the intruder since then. The mess of broken glass scattered all over the bedroom was not fun to deal with, but we thought about how awful it would have been if we had already been gone when it happened. No telling what kind of a mess we would have found returning home!
“ So do not be anxious for tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Matthew 6:34. True….so true!
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