Addicted To Mother Earth: The Duck Tale 🦆🏞️

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“Quack, quack, quack.” As the mother duck found its way through the river alongside her ducklings, Clement watched the birds as they shook their tails in quick succession, moving in a straight line with a rhythm. It was as if there was an unseen drummer giving them a beat to make their movements rhyme. He had seen sights like this before, but the feeling of this moment was so different and unique that he decided to follow the ducks a bit more.

He watched as they effortlessly wiped the water off their feathers and swam with their webbed feet. Like Clement was their audience, he cheered and couldn’t believe the ducks decided to give him such a gracious show. “Nice one, guys!” He shouted as if they could hear him. Soon, it seemed as if Clement and the ducks had a connection.

He got carried away with their performance, not realizing they were going deeper into the river. He soon found his trousers dipped in water. As the sensation of the cold river traveled up his veins, he jumped in shock. His shoes were wet, and he couldn’t believe he would have to go back home to change his dirty trousers. “The principal won’t listen to any of my excuses today,” he said to himself.

Clement is a married man who worked as a teacher at a secondary school. Although he is an adult, he often tries to find pleasure in what a lot of people count as childish. In his defense, he always makes them realize that he is appreciating nature.

Like a man whom everyone thinks is mad but keeps trying to explain himself to them, people often ignore his perspective, even when it sounds reasonable. Like a tree shading an animal from the brightness of the clouds, only his wife, Victoria, takes him seriously and believes all he says, especially because she’s a geologist, which was why they got married in the first place.

“Mr. Clement, can you please stop playing with sand?” Amos, who was a fellow teacher, got irritated when he saw Clement packing sand. “I am not playing with it; have you ever thought about the different types of sand we have and wondered if we could find more aside from the ones we’ve known?” Clement said. “What if there are some hidden facts that can bring more blessings to us than we can ever imagine?” he added.

Like an agama lizard, Amos shakes his head vertically in sarcasm. “I totally agree with you that one day you will discover how unhealthy you are upstairs,” he says. Like an odd sheep being bullied in a pack, Clement often gets abused by his colleagues due to his inquisitiveness and interest in knowing more about nature.

As a biology teacher, he wasn’t excluded from the mockery of his students, who often called him several names like “adult-kid,” “earth-surface,” and other ridiculous titles. But, as always, he finds solace in his wife after work. With the trust he had found in his wife, the words of his colleagues and students to him are like waters off a duck’s back!

“Darling, we have a lot to discuss after your shower.” As a geologist, Victoria always has a way to start a conversation that Clement would always find interesting and inexhaustive. They often talk all night before forcing themselves to bed.

On the fateful day, Clement got carried away with the performance of the ducks and had to go back home. He never knew the principal, and his colleagues had been looking for a way to get him out of the school. After changing his clothes and getting back to school at a very late time, he found a letter on his desk, and by the time he opened it, it was a sack letter!

His colleagues were ready to make fun of him, thinking he was going to cry like a baby. But the funny thing that surprised even Amos himself was that the only scene that kept coming to his head was that moment when the ducks that got him sacked were wiggling their tales and the waters from the river were getting off their backs. The only words that he could coin from the scenario were more like the ducks telling the water, “You’ve got nothing on me, liquid!”

Without a second thought, Amos went straight to the principal’s office. Like a speaker amplifying what had been said into a microphone, he shouted at him, “You got nothing on me, liquid!” The principal was so shocked that he sat still at his seat; he had never seen Amos in that form before, and sweaty liquids were actually rolling down his cheeks.

When Victoria heard the whole story of what happened to Amos, she, just as always, gave him all the encouragement and support. Like the cake below the icing, she also supported her husband with her life savings so he could start a business of his choice.

“I know he’s going to build a future I can live in," Victoria said to herself. Like Amos was in her mind, “I know just what to do with this money. We’ll start a duck farm!” It wasn’t totally what Victoria was expecting, but she’s confident they’ll bring the best out of his idea.