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Eighty-six. How old my mother was when she died.

I went for a walk on the cold beach with my ghost-dog Molly this evening, beautiful waves, my old ocean, and a light on the shining sand that made me gasp in wonder when I turned around to see it.

There were happy friendly dogs chasing each other, or a ball or frisbee, or just running for the joy of it, for the big empty space where you can feel your legs loping, your body singing with the speed of it all.

And when I came back over the little wooden bridge, there were two pairs of Mallards in the water below me, dabbling away, chatting amiably with one another.  All of a sudden there was a swoop of wings and another duck swept over my head and landed in the water.  He started swimming excitedly towards the group, until one of the males quacked loudly at him and he turned around and began swimming hurriedly in the opposite direction.  I wonder what he said to the stranger?  "Bugger-off! These are OUR women!"

Mallards pair off in October and November and stay together until the start of the nesting season, which is in April.  They are like the pigeon, the fox and coyote, which have thrived in urban areas, and because they need a safe spot for their eggs, they will often lay them in window-boxes or on roof-gardens, where the ducklings need human intervention in order to leave the nest!  The ducklings are precocial, which means that they can do more or less whatever the adults do almost as soon as they are born, like swimming, but they can't fly off rooftops quite yet.

Apparently they learn about migration from their parents, because they don't always stay with them until everyone flies off, but they still know the way.  Mallards which are raised in captivity somehow lose that ability, that instinct.  You can't help but wonder about long duck-language conversations about which way is the best, and where is a good place to stop, and "are we there yet?" questions.   

On Thursdays I Skype with my daughters. It is something I always look forward to, so lovely to see and talk to my darley girls, even though I can't hold them.

A few years ago Skype didn't work in Jessica's area, or there was not enough bandwidth. And the phone line was horrendous, so Jess and I would have these frustrating phone conversations where we couldn't really hear one another, or one of us could hear but the other was listening through fuzzy cotton-wool.  If you concentrated extremely hard you could sometimes get the gist of a sentence and make a pertinent answer, but sometimes after a while I would give up and just say, "Really?", or "Mmmhmmm," because I felt it was so tedious and soul-destroying for Jess to have to repeat herself all the time. 

My mother phoned me for a weekly catch-up every Sunday night, and I have continued the tradition, although I get to do it twice a week.  My mother would call and I would spend an hour or so chatting about my children, and myself, because that is what you do with your mother, she wants to hear everything, she is proud of the granddaughter who is doing well in piano-playing, happy to hear which baby has started to clap, sympathises with the latest exploits of the older granddaughter, and laughs at the story of the other baby's first tantrum.  And then I ask her about her week, and hear how she went to Book club, and what she is busy knitting at the moment, about the lace-making which she learned at the tender age of seventy, of her friends who pop in, of outings with my cantankerous old dad whose driving is getting worse.

Today I heard of a very sweet pigeon who has adopted the veterinary surgery where Jess the animal-whisperer works, after they fixed his injury.  He waits on the roof of the church hall near the office, and when they open for the day Frikkie the pigeon marches in and takes over.  Jess did a very good rendition of the sound of his clicking feet on the floor or the counter, and how he cocks his little head to assess the situation.  I could envisage Frikkie, undeterred as he tries to make friends with the decidedly antagonistic parrot,  and how he is equally friendly to and unafraid of man and dog.  A credit to his species.

Talking to Emma later we somehow remember the knitting she had to do for school in Standard Four, when she was eleven, of which I have already written somewhere in this blog. Tim had to learn how to knit because he is left-handed and then he could teach the leftie Emma who by this stage had a mental block against the hapless knitting needles.   Each pupil in her class had to learn the basic steps and then use what they had learned to create a knitted article, like a scarf (very popular) or a jersey/sweater, which some ambitious children attempted.  Emma ended up after a few months with a small rectangle, about the size of a photograph, which I judiciously helped her roll up and sew together into the shape of an owl, if you were very imaginative and noticed the button-eyes and cinched "ear-tufts".

What we hadn't realised was that a "show" had been arranged where the girls all got to model their new articles of clothing, so the parents had to attend and everyone was so proud to see their daughter swanning across the stage in all her hand-made finery, neck wrapped elegantly in the knitted scarf, or flouncing across in the lovely pink jersey she had made, and then there was Emma, stylishly modelling a tiny knitted owl on her outstretched hand.