Neebish Island 2017: Weaning My Cherubs

I see a mama duck, the kind with a mohawk on its head, paddle by the cabin with 15 ducklings paddling behind her.  They shuffle up to the front of the pack, climb on her back, take a free ride for a few feet and slide off her back.  Each baby duckling also has a mohawk on its head.  I grab my little three and four-year-old ducklings, still in their onesie pajamas, and tuck one under each arm to take them to the edge of the point to take in the Neebish Island ecosystem.  After observing the ducklings enjoy their mama’s back, we hustle back in and look up these unusual ducks in the bird book.

I get up to make a cup of coffee, wondering if we are still composting the coffee grinds, freezing the banana peels and burning the burnable garbage.  Our house rules change day by day.  I hold up an empty plastic container of coffee creamer and think about my chore of burning the trash.  The next thought I have is one that city living, never inspires.  What kind of creamer could I buy that produces the least amount of garbage?  I guess I need to find a store I can bring my own containers too.  My mind flits to the pint-size glass milk jugs in the tool shed which the last 100 years of men who manned this house have recycled to organize their 10,000 nuts and bolts.  I suppose the good ole days of suburban living are over when we all used cloth diapers, and a service picked them up and dropped them off, and Oberweiss dropped off the milk jugs and picked up the empties.  I hate to think about how much trash I produce. Having no garbage collection on the island changes my relationship to leftovers and containers of all sizes.  I find myself strategizing, like my grandma, on how to not throw anything away.  Living on the island is like camping, you have to consume, burn, or carry out what you take in. 

Grandma interrupts my thought, “I enjoy books. I invest in books.” She says as she brings me two North American birding books “A guide to field identification.” “You should really go out with a professional birder.  They know everything.  They are nice people.  I was a book buyer.  Not a novice.” She continues.

I take her in--her healthy skin and bones; her slight frame and pronounce, “Grandma, I think you will live to be 100.”  

“So do I,” she responds.  “I am healthy.”

We debate what a group of ducks is called.  Not a herd. Not a school.  Maybe a gaggle.  

“The ducks come each year with a gaggle of 15 ducklings, and leave with two or three at the end of summer.  The fish eat them.”

She watches me try to navigate my youngest child who has an even stronger character than her namesake, Maggie Lovejoy, my grandmother’s mother.

“You might want to get yourself of a copy of that book, The Strong Willed Child.  I raised five kids. I’m not ignorant on the subject.” She adds.

“Were any of your kids strong willed?” I ask innocently and probably knowing the answer.

“No, not really.”  But she sill has a lot of good parenting advice.  For instance, I recently tried to walk Santi through the six male dog characters in his favorite show Paw Patrol and the two female dog characters and talk about how our media consumption should have a balanced number of men and women in lead and supporting roles.  Grandma listened and suggested that instead of covering sexism and Hollywood with my four-year-old Santiago Lovejoy I should start by weaning them.