DUCK AND COVER

This tale came from my daughter in Chicago ........ Erica, even though she is in graduate school, and very busy, often drove North of the city to a nursing home to visit with her grandmother on Sunday afternoons. On one such occasion, as she was crossing the parking lot, she was surprised by the sight of a mother duck, followed by a line of ducklings, coming towards her from the pond nearby. Smiling to herself, she went inside and spent a few hours trying to cheer up Grandma Polly and relieve her loneliness a bit. As she went to get back in her car, she noticed that the mother duck was now frantically waddling around a large rain drain in the parking lot. Worse, there seemed to be a smaller number of ducklings. She quickly went over, having done the calculation of mother+ducklings+sewer, as a sum that did not bode well. Luckily, she had on jeans, so she lay down on the pavement and peered into the grate. Sure enough, she could see a duckling inside on a projecting pipe. (I should mention that Erica is a social worker, so of course had to immediately go into rescue mode. ) She managed to pull, in spite of its wiggling, one little critter out. Then, she realized that the numbers still did not add up. Reaching down once again, she did retrieve several more, but she feared other babies were still trapped. Her cell phone came in handy at this point, as it occurred to her to call the nursing home, just across the lot, and ask for help from the maintenance staff. She said she was never so happy as when she saw two big, strong men coming towards her, who were able to use crowbars to pry up the grate. Soon, all the little guys were back with their mom, heading once again to the pond....... Now you know where that expression "circling the drain" comes from!