People make mistakes.
Sometimes they don’t matter, but they may have consequences ranging from
financial loss to emotional pain to loss of life. Most mistakes are small,
though, and some of those may become guidelines to life “from now on.” In
short, we learn a lesson.
We made lots of mistakes
when we moved from town to the country. We really didn’t know the first thing
about living in the country. Although both of our fathers had owned farms, in
neither case did the landowner live on his land. Oh, we were naïve!
We had a pond dug close by
the creek that runs through the bottom of our property. It rained and the pond
filled up. We trudged down the hill to admire it. Dennis remarked that it would
be nice to have a duck floating on our pond and the next day bought a white
duck. The duck was happy swimming in the pond. It looked good, too.
The pond was far from our
house, essentiality in the middle of a woods inhabited by coyotes, raccoons,
and other hungry wildlife. The duck didn’t even make it through the first
night. When we went down to the pond we found only a bill and two yellow feet.
From then on we avoided buying a duck. In fact, when we are about to decide to change something
we ask ourselves, “Is this a duck?”
I still regret that the
white duck had to pay the ultimate price for our naivety.
Copyright
2017 by Shirley Domer
