I have to preface this by saying that I spent my winter break trying to finish writing a book that I’ve been working on forever. By forever I mean two years past its deadline and at least one year past the point when I realized I had done thousands of hours’ worth of mind-breaking labor on something probably only my sister and a couple of other people would ever read. Of course, writing for my sister—actually writing my sister, because she’s in the book—seems to me like a worthwhile enough endeavor, since I have no choice. Once I start something, I always finish, for better or worse, because it’s my personality. And once you begin an essay or a story or even a lecture, as many know, it takes on a life of its own. It’s like getting on a sled at the top of a hill; you’re steering—perhaps—but you’re mostly a passenger. Writing a book, as it turns out, is the same, only very, very different—in my case, at least—because over the course of five years “or so,” the snow has melted and there’s just grass and gravel. It takes a lot to get the sled moving, and then it goes only a few inches.

So that was my winter break: sitting on my sled every morning for hours and then trying to capture my ducks in the afternoon.

I have eight ducks.

These are technically domesticated ducks, but domesticated doesn’t mean they like you—in fact, just the opposite. They are called domestic ducks because people eat them, and they know it. All summer they were their own ducks, swimming on the pond and eating grubs from the bank. They can’t fly, having been engineered as meat factories, so when winter comes, they need to be moved to a safe enclosure. But I couldn’t catch them, even after the pond began to freeze, getting smaller and smaller until all that remained was a bathtub-size hole we were keeping open with a heavy pipe and our own arms. The predators began to arrive like suitors. Every night—coyotes, bobcats, foxes, raccoons. Tracks circling the pond, getting closer and closer, until one afternoon, as I stood there, a weasel came running across the ice and attacked them right in their bathtub.