It all started a couple of years ago with a particularly irritating dream about a squeaking door and with my husband swiftly elbowing me in the ribs. I woke up disoriented and looked at the alarm clock to discover it was 4 am. Despite waking up, the squeaking from my dream continued and Tim insisted that I look at our balcony. The scene playing out in front of me was too much to comprehend at that time of the night. A weird shadow was walking back and forth on our cement flower bed. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that the shadow was, in fact, a duck. The setting of the night, the dispersing darkness and my mental haze made her look unreal and very dramatic, like a duck avenger or a duck superhero or some messenger of sorts. In the end, we took a picture and went back to sleep. The duck came back the next night and the night after and I became obsessed with figuring out what she was trying to tell me. Should I play the lottery? Invest in stocks of foie gras? Make duck for dinner? What did the duck want? It turned out pretty quickly, that all she wanted was to lay some eggs in our flower pot, which she proceeded to do… and then she made herself completely at home. After some research, Tim got in touch with the Duck Lady, a Düsseldorf woman who donates her free time to rescue ducks, which nest in weird places. After a 30 minute telephone conversation she managed to thoroughly scare him. It turned out that baby ducks cannot fly and if they fall from our fourth-floor balcony, they will be falling towards a certain baby duck death and if that happens, then Tim will forever be a baby duck killer. The discussion resulted in Tim spending 60 Euros in the home improvement store and another 3 hours in own engineering efforts to create a foolproof netting system to be put around the flower pot. A closed facility, if you will, for the most delinquent and curious baby ducks. The duck momma was christened as Zelda, provided with some hay and wheat, and the three of us sat, watched and waited.
