Duck At Rest

Sometimes the duck sits in the corner of the tub; more often, it migrates to the bathroom closet to sit on a narrow shelf, borne aloft by some misbegotten fit of organizing and then it gets bumped and lands on the floor, behind the clothes hamper. I push it around with my foot or, if I’m feeling ambitious, with the broom, or maybe I’m scrubbing the floor, trying to be Buddhist-like about doing housework wherein cleaning isn’t just a chore, it’s a meditation, and then I might look at it and think, I should really throw that out, there’s mold inside from countless bath times when my children were small and there’s a scrum of dirt that’s really just dust that has hardened into a film over the top. I don’t throw it out, though, and that’s because I remember the glory days of this little rubber duck. The duck is enshrined in a photograph where my boys, at ages one and three, are playing in the tub and that duck figures prominently in that photo, and another, wherein I cajoled my husband to get into the tub with the boys to pose for a ridiculous photo and I can hear the happy shrieking laughter of the kids, and my husband looking sheepish, but laughing, too, and the duck bobs up and down on the tiny waves in the tub, made by those playing children, that accommodating husband. The duck is always upright and cheery, always in the thick of the action, up and down, swimming among my children in perpetuity. Maybe I’ll clean it, drench it in bleach, pass it on, I think, but why would I clean an old rubber ducky? So it sits there, a static symbol in a place where everything is in motion, where children grow up and move away, bodies decay, people die, jobs are lost and found, friends come and go, but here’s this duck, going from shelf to floor to shelf again, a mostly forgotten witness to happy moments in a tub years ago. Just this week I picked it up from the floor where it has fallen yet again, and return it to the shelf. Why throw it out? The duck has earned its keep.

By Adrienne Pilon

From: United States