The interesting thing is that to a duck, the human with the garden rake fighting the weasel is scarier than the weasel itself—this is the shame of meat-eating, that these amazing creatures with shimmering heads and bodies that look like stained glass are most afraid of the predator fighting off the predator. We did all survive—weasel, woman, flock—though I had to sit outside with a rake on my lap that night. I felt rightly responsible for the ducks after all the wrongs that have been done to them, from their obscenely heavy breasts to the little wooden boxes they get stuffed into at the farm auction. The boxes are duck-size—as in, exactly the size of the duck. All we could see were their terrified trapped faces, and getting them out was like pulling something through a knothole. Their poor wings.

I should say, I didn’t even mind sitting next to the pond most of the night, possibly being crept up on by a bobcat, because it was new to me, and so much of what I do isn’t. It felt like material for an essay: sitting on a log with a rake across my lap in the black country night, surrounded by snow and stars, wearing an old floor-to-ceiling down coat I bought in Ann Arbor in 1992 when I was having a midwestern-style nervous breakdown.

Actually it wasn’t a breakdown, it was a breakup, but that’s another story.

So I spent my winter vacation sitting on the writing sled in the mornings and trying to capture the ducks (for their own safety) in the afternoons, and at some point I got a call from Vijay asking me to give a craft talk in our school’s writing lounge, which we for some reason call the Pillow Room, right after the new semester started.

I had two thoughts right away. First, I know more about art than craft, and second, what if the Pillow Room truly were a pillow room? All one giant pillow, where you had to wallow instead of sit in straight chairs and where all the walls were padded and lava lights were on low coffee tables. I had these thoughts on my sled, by the way. If I could give a craft talk in a true pillow room, I might have a better chance of making sense, simply because half the people in the room would either be high or feel high.