I have a window garden with three potted plants–basil, mint and rosemary. The rosemary has always done pretty well (unlike my last rosemary plant, which is a different story for another day). The basil pot originally contained three plants, two of which died in the first month. The final plant gets a little droopy sometimes when I go too long without watering, but has generally been pretty healthy. The mint plant, on the other hand, reminds me a great deal of a duckling I raised several years ago.
It was the last time we adopted baby birds. We wanted a small number of pullets (female chickens under a year old) who could live quietly in the backyard, and my parents were resolute that despite the fact that water fowl bond with humans much more closely than chickens do, and baby geese are among the most adorable creatures this world has ever seen, we were only getting chickens.
It was a resolution they could not keep.
We talked them into a gosling, and then noticed the duckling that seemed to be half drowned in the water dish.
One of the employees noticed our attention to the sad little duck. “She’s probably not gonna make it, but she’d probably have a better chance with you guys than anywhere else. We’ll give her to you if you want to try.”
We started up at our parents with huge sad eyes, and they caved. We could have the dying duckling and one other.
The little duck lived. We named her Genevieve and she became a healthy, thriving bird. And then out puppy broke mom’s lamp, and he was sentenced to splitting the penned space in the backyard with the birds.
Dandin was a mutt with some kind of hunting dog in his heritage. When he saw birds, he knew exactly what he was supposed to do with them, and he wasn’t interested in making friends. When we came home, we found Genevieve suffering several bite wounds and missing half her feathers, but still up and fighting. She had the dog cowering. They didn’t share the back yard again, and Dandin found a new home.
Again, she came back from the brink. The bites healed, her feathers grew back. She hit her first adult molting and proved that we had incorrectly guessed her gender as her feathers grew in the mallard green (we didn’t change her name or our pronoun usage, just acknowledged that she was male and moved on with life). She, the goose and the other duck outgrew the kiddie pool in our back yard, and we gave them away to a family with a pond. Mom would walk by most mornings and report on our birds, until at last she stopped seeing them and started siting a family of foxes living in the area. We like to think Genevieve wasn’t hunted down, but attacked the foxes on her own initiative, claiming her territory and defending the other birds who made the place home. Or perhaps when fall came they flew south. We shall not know.
My mint plant has almost completely died back three times now, and each time it puts out a few new shoots and starts again. I don’t know why it’s died back, and I don’t know how to help it overcome this cycle and become a strong, healthy plant again. But I do admire it’s resilience. To come back from nothing and put out tiny brave new leaves, to be the duckling drowning in the water dish and then hold your own in a fight with a half grown dog, it takes some guts.
I may have some strange heroes.