August 14
5.30 a.m.
Annie has started school again. Second grade. To beat traffic, we need to leave home by 6.45. In order to first feed the birds and get in some weeding – not to mention coffee — I need to get up around 5 and be back home not long after 6. It’s still dark at 5, and will only become darker from here on, but there’s a dull light from the east. Enough to bike by.
I was greeted this morning by a cranky old neighbor yelling that my ducks were in his newly planted paddy. Indeed they were, and I felt bad about it. He chased them back onto our place, and I hastily patched up the netting meant to keep them there. My lone farmhand, Ai Seud, is a real local. He does work to the extent that it appears that work was done, but not enough that it actually is done. The big exception is his work in the rice field. That’s pretty darned good, at least from my novice viewpoint. And that’s the main job, so he’s okay.
The cranky neighbor, Uncle Oon, isn’t my favorite. This is not to confuse him with the next guy over, another Uncle Oon, who is one of my favorites. Asshole Oon, as I affectionately call the cranky guy, wasn’t exactly cussing me out over the ducks, but he was muttering pretty hard some unintelligible old man local dialect.
I understand my responsibility to keep my ducks out of his paddy, even if the other Oon never met this obligation when it came to keeping his ducks, chickens or cows off of my turf. (I still like him, though.) Regardless, the local custom is to keep your ducks out of your neighbors’ freshly planted rice fields, lest the clumsy ducks stomp all over the young seedlings. After a few weeks, the plants are strong enough to handle the ducks, and even benefit from them. This is a custom I’ll respect, and I rode over to wake up Ai Seud and gently badger him to do his &$#%ing job.
I just wish the local duck ethic extended to fire and poisons. Asshole Oon of the duck grievance is the same Asshole Oon that burnt off the rice stubble on his paddy a couple of months ago and torched a bunch of my young trees. He’s the same Asshole Oon that blasted herbicide on his dyke and killed my melon seedlings. Actually, it was my dyke, but he or his clan had surreptitiously moved the property markers to marginally expand their land. He’s the same Asshole Oon that raced to put up a completely extraneous barbwire fence between our orchard plots, markedly degrading an otherwise nice atmosphere. “I’m not going to steal your mangoes, Asshole Oon,” I told him. “And if I wanted to, your stupid fence wouldn’t stop me!” And when it came to his lichee fruit, which I really was looking forward to stealing (a little bit anyway), he blasted it with pesticide before I could get any – and did it when my daughter was standing 20 feet away!
A couple days after he put up the fence, I found a dead owl hanging from the barbs. Killing that owl is probably the worst thing he did to me.
But regardless of his innocent iniquities, we have to deal with the ducks. Don’t want to find them hanging on his damned fence.
