The past few weeks, a mysterious gift fairy has left several little pastel mini ducks in my mailbox at school…16 total so far. This morning, as I introduced them to Santa Duck, Ginger Duck, Abominable Duck, Eyelash Duck, and Jumbo Sparkle Duck, adding them to an impressive, growing collection displayed in my classroom cabinets, I thought it was funny that I just told “the duck story” yesterday when our principal asked me about them during our English department meeting.

If you’d told me five years ago that anyone might associate me with rubber ducks, I wouldn’t have believed you. Jeep people exchange ducks in solidarity, but I don’t own a Jeep.

I do love the duck metaphor: calm on the surface, paddling like hell underneath. I can relate to that, but never really felt any particular connection to rubber ducks themselves, until the pandemic.

On the first day of school in August 2020, teacher shit was bananas. The school year was opening exclusively online, the whole world was shut down, nobody was allowed to report to campus. We had our new Zoom accounts and online learning platforms without hardly any training and zero idea what was even happening.

The truth is, whatever it might have looked like from the inside of your kitchens and living room couches, from our end, it was all smoke and mirrors…I was a face on a screen, the freakin Wizard of Oz. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

None of us knew what we were doing…none of us had any direction, nobody knew anything except “I gotta be there for my students”. We were boat captains trying to build and operate a janky ass airplane while its wheels were lifting up off the runway into the air.

During the pandemic, I had a lot of downtime and nowhere to go. I entertained myself filming videos about my shopping experiences, observations about online activity, a few jokes and wonderings, I wrote a few embarrassing pandemic teacher remixes of rap songs…and there was one time when I thought it was so funny that nobody on Zoom can see your lower half that I filmed a somewhat philosophical statement about education and stood up at the end to reveal I’d been wearing clown pants all along. Essentially, the youtube channel was a rookie creative effort kinda hinting at the vibe of this blog before this blog existed.

So, I figured that a crazy, unprecedented first day of school might make a fun video…even if I never posted it to youtube, it would still be an interesting historical moment to capture…That one time when we started school from home.

I had the idea a few days before, in one of our staff zoom meetings, our principal said, “If you’re the kind of person who likes to have your ducks in a row, this may not be the year when that’s possible for you.”

As far as teaching is concerned, I do feel like I usually have my ducks in a row, so her comment absolutely terrified me…this was about to be a really hard year.

I imagined throwing handfuls of rubber ducks into the air…maybe that could make a fun video…I could get props! There would only be one chance to do it, totally worth it, so I ordered some rubber ducks and flamingos on Amazon, accidentally shaved off my eyebrows with a new trimmer that arrived in the same delivery, and then I hit record….

This video got more views than any of my other videos combined. People shared it, there was laughing and commiserating and sympathizing…it felt like a real community experience in a time when I was feeling so isolated and alone.

I kept my ducks in a little bowl on my home office desk while I was teaching remotely and then, a few months later, when we were allowed back on campus, I brought them all to work and lined them up on my classroom window ledge, as inspiration to get my ducks back in a row.

The following year, I lined up my window ducks in August and then my personal life hit some jagged rocks and, again, I was going through it.

I tried to keep it all in at work, but most of my school family probably knew I was struggling. I will always be grateful for them, they gave me the space to emotionally hibernate without asking too many questions. One of my colleagues knocked on my door one day and said he brought me a sandwich because it looked like I wasn’t eating. I thanked him, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.

And then, one day, ducks just started showing up on my desk, on my chair, in my mailbox…anonymously, randomly, with so much love…my school family was giving me hugs in the most beautiful way. And nobody ever took credit for it, nobody ever mentioned it or asked if I got a duck today.

My students started to ask about the ducks…a few asked if they could have one. I’d relay the story of the pandemic video and what it means to have one’s ducks in a row. And then they started bringing me ducks too…ones they’d found in a closet or on a trip to the dollar store.

And now I have a whole waddling of fun, happy ducks, all with incredibly heartwarming stories and memories.

I moved rooms this year, so the ducks now have their own multi-level display case right by the door. They’re the first thing I see when I walk in every morning. I am reminded every single day of the kindness of others, the generosity of love that people share without it being a transaction, how wonderful it feels to be thought of and seen by beautiful mysterious fairies who make my world brighter and give my ducks new friends to hang with.

It feels like manifesting. It’s got real village vibes. Something that started with a video where I shared my weaknesses in anxiety and fear, something that then became a metaphor for a life out of order, was picked up and dusted off by good humans who just knew what to do: feed it love…and some funky ducks.