The dead bird and other stuff

Another week sped by.  Tomorrow my son heads off to a football game but I won’t be able to attend it since I’ll be at soccer with my daughter.  She has only three games left in the season.  (And all the parents rejoice!)

My husband’s been in California for three weeks now and it’s just the weirdest thing ever to be separated from him.  We’ve never been apart this long in the twenty-three years we’ve been married.  At least I am extremely busy.  Less time for introverted wallowing.  This weekend I intend to get the items in the storage room completely packed up or given away.

A day or two ago, I heard the noise of motors in the front of my house, so I went to the living room window to investigate.  It turned out that a crew was working on my neighbor’s lawn across the street.  As I stood there, a little distracted, I happened to look down at the boxwood hedge outside.

A bird lay on its side.  If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that it simply stopped, fell over sideways and slept, but of course, it was dead.

I saw a smear of feathers on the window.

Poor bird dove head first into my picture window and died.

I would sum this up with a moral about the fragility of life, but that’s not really how the story went.  The story went like this:

Oh no.  How sad.  Poor bird.

I should dispose of that.

Huh.  I wish my husband would dispose of that.

How long has that dead bird been there anyway?

I have to take care of that myself.  If only it weren’t raining.

And I have slippers on.

I better get back to work.

Maybe no one will notice.

Hey, wait.  Do raccoons eat dead birds?

I should move that dead bird before my daughter sees it.

Hey, wait, that would be a good lesson about death in a very detached way.  We didn’t know the bird’s name, after all.

Okay, I’m pretending I didn’t see the dead bird.

Back to work.

When I returned tonight from driving my son to football practice, my daughter informed me that there was a dead bird outside.  “Adam used a tissue and threw it away,” she told me.

Well.  And that was that.

See what happens when you just pretend you didn’t see something?  Someone else takes care of things!

Lesson learned.