When we were kids, my grandma would periodically take my brother and I to feed wild ducks by the river that runs through the town she lived in.
My grandparents kept a metal trash can in their garage filled to the top with dried corn kernels. Grandma would dip a plastic bucket for each of us into the trash can. Then she drove us a mile or so to the river- back then, it seemed a lot farther.
We’d park near the same patch of grass each time, the ducks waddling toward us before we even got out of the car. What a thrill, flinging handfuls of corn to rain down on our fanbase! They devoured it and baby stepped toward us, chattering, emboldened by greed.
Later, when I was a teenager, my grandma once again scooped kernels into buckets in preparation for another visit to the river. I asked where she got the corn, wondering if it came in fifty-pound bags the way other birdseed did. She gestured toward the farm kitty-corner to their block. The cornfield.
“You stole it?!” I asked with astonished eyes. I hadn’t thought of my grandma as a thief.
She flinched at the ugly word, as if it were a wasp flying straight for her face. “You don’t steal it,” she said defensively. “You just…take it.”
I was at a loss for how to respond.
Incidentally, I’m currently rereading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Huck talks about “borrowing” melons and other produce from farm fields while he’s on the run. His dad told him that it isn’t stealing if you intend to pay the farmers back someday, which, of course, he doesn’t.
In the last story [here], I mentioned my great-grandma picking corn from someone else’s farm field. So maybe yoinking crops was in my grandma’s DNA. Her perspective could’ve also been shaped by her parents, who had been farmers. Maybe they were generous with their own produce and assumed other growers held a similar attitude. Or maybe they were cheap and self-centered. Mother and daughter had both lived through the Great Depression, when people may have had to bend the rules to survive.
As for the ducks, there are now signs posted by the river saying not to feed the animals. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out the signs were posted back then, too, seeing how my grandma made her own rules.