Dinner went off swimming

I spent the weekend gathering the last of my herbs and digging up bulbs in the garden.

The floor in the room that we eat in is covered with drying plants that I will use for making tea and infusions this winter.

Sunday afternoon my eleven-year-old son Timmy and I took a walk, and we found a large puffball mushroom under an old apple tree. I cooked it up by saut/ing it in butter. It tasted a lot like chicken.

If you have never seen a puffball mushroom, they look just like a large white soccer ball.

Besides the mushroom, we gathered sumac berries, which make a red tea, and the best treasure of all according to Timmy was finding a skull of a dog. The skull was intact and bleached by the sun. I told Timmy that I didn't want the skull in the house, so it is setting outside on a rock wall.

We took care of my oldest son Dan's dog for a week while he went away with his wife. His dog is a golden retriever puppy named Jack. The dog loped around the yard and was underfoot anytime anyone was outside. I have two smaller dogs' and they were extremely annoyed with Jack. Our hens hid in their barn and didn't set foot outside until two days after Jack returned home. Besides the hens, I have six ducks and they had disappeared while Jack was here. The two oldest ducks, that have been residing here for four years, showed up Sunday evening. My young ducks, which I plan on butchering, were nowhere to be found.

"I'm going to go and look for those ducks," I said to Tom.

"You won't find them. Jack probably scared them down into the woods and who knows what could have eaten them," Tom said.

"We did hear coyotes one night when Jack was here," I said.

"Those ducks are gone. We will never know what happened to them," Tom shrugged.

I didn't agree with him and said, "I think they are still around here. I'm going to go and look for them."

I told Timmy to come with me to look for the ducks. He was dragging his feet as he followed me outside. Timmy said that I wasn't going to find the ducks as they were really, really gone.

I know that Tom and Timmy give up on anything quickly. I walked outside straight to a wooded, wet area that is not far from the house and there swimming in the water were my renegade ducks.

"HA!" I said to Timmy. "See, I knew they were alive. Now we can have duck for dinner this winter."

I am looking forward to eating those young ducks as we took good care of them this past summer. I was going to be very disappointed if anything had happened to them. There is not a lot of meat on a duck, and it can be a pain to get all the feathers off, but the end results of a good meal will be worth it. Those two older ducks won't be that disappointed to see the young ducks go as they act like they are too good for their company anyway.

Last year a fox killed and ate my older duck hen when she was setting on eggs. The two older ducks were upset for days when she died and so was I.

Those two old ducks have the run of the place and spend most of their time hanging out with the wild ducks in a pond across our road. They are fat and hearty and tough. They can hang out here a long time