I stopped to chat.
They laughed. The duck smiled with his eyes.
The duck, a Swedish blue, was a household pet, the likes of which I had never seen. I couldnât stop staring.
âWhen the duckâs inside the house it wears a diaper,â I was told.
He was beautiful.
I said my goodbyes and thought to myself, âMaybe Rollo (my medium-size shih tzu) would like a duck friend.â Then I thought, maybe not. And later, definitely not. Winter is over, spring is here and I want my life to be easier. Simpler.
No more using fabric tablecloths every day, maybe just wipeable place mats. But no, that would never do. I could use Bisquick instead of flour and baking powder when making a coffee cake, but that wouldnât be particularly tasty.
Caesar the No Drama Llama
Claim to fame: Appeared at last year s protests as a paragon of chill among the chaos.
What s the story? Before 2020, Caesar was only the Portland area s second-most famous therapy llama, having first sparked local attention when a photo of him riding the MAX made the rounds on Reddit. But after Rojo went off to the great grass field in the sky and his taxidermied body got sent to the Washington State School for the Blind in late 2019, the Salem-based camelid stepped up to fill the void. His owner, Larry McCool of Mystic Llama Farms, began bringing him to the nightly protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, both to show solidarity with the racial justice movement and to provide a calming presence in a tense situation. National media outlets like