Some of my in-laws visited us a couple of weeks ago.
A niece, a soon-to-be high school graduate, was considering coming to SFA next fall. So she and her mom decided to come to Showcase Saturday, and my mother-in-law came along for the ride.
My mother-in-law loves to visit our home. She loves the water almost as much as we do, so watching the water and accompanying wildlife from the comfort of our living room on the shores of Lake Nacogdoches is one of her favorite things to do when she visits.
Shortly after they arrived, I noticed a few ducks floating around our boathouse. At the time, I thought about how much my mother-in-law would enjoy seeing the ducks. It's the time of year when we have a lot of winter ducks on the lake. They make strange sounds, but they're sounds that we associate with the coming of winter. I look forward to their return each fall, and when they leave in the late winter or early spring, it means warmer weather is on the way.
On this particular day, the ducks congregating around our boathouse looked, from a distance, more like brown mallards, but with more coloring. How nice, I thought. I assumed my husband had just put out some food to attract them.
It was a busy day for all of us, coupled with a home SFA game that night. It wasn't until Sunday morning that I did a double-take toward our boathouse. Something seemed to be wrong with one of the ducks. It was floating on its side. I thought it was sick, or possibly dead.
Then it dawned on me \— the same group of ducks had been floating in almost the same place for about 24 hours. How strange is that? And, usually, our dogs, Lucky and Lady, chase off any fowl that approach our boathouse by water, and they chase after crows and other birds that land in our yard.
I grabbed the binoculars to take a closer look.
My husband was on the couch at the time when I commented to him, "Those are fake ducks."
He peered over his magazine, rolling his eyes, and said, "They're called decoys."
Well, they sure faked me out.
I was feeling pretty stupid as I commented to my niece about my lack of acute observational skills, when she laughed and said she had been a sucker for my husband's humor as well. She didn't realize the ducks were decoys either, not until the next day.
The decoys are still positioned around our boathouse. My husband literally has these ducks "in a row," tied off to bricks to keep them from floating away. And they still bother the dogs, who can't seem to understand why these ducks are not afraid of fierce barking. It's always scared them away before.
And we still have visitors who don't realize at first that they're decoys. Sometimes, it takes a whole day before someone comments that those ducks sure don't move around very much.
Makes me feel a little less stupid.
