Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
Let There Be Light... Again
I can never throw anything away, not even this front porch light of ours that got so repeatedly taken over by nesting birds that it finally shorted out the whole line, forcing us to spend $400 on a NEW light and an electrician to make repairs and install it.It was no small job: It took three hours of his time and several holes drilled in our front hall ceiling to run out a new line.In the meantime we had this square glass thing, stuffed entirely with grasses and bits of straw and other nesting materials thought useful by the various momma birds that made their home in it over time. (This imperfect blurred picture shows how it looked when David took it down the last time.)The birds did these every spring for three springs and it was awful for us. We couldn't use the front porch light without incinerating a whole family, or soon to be family if the babies were still in their egg stage, and we were we about to do that!So company was forever stumbling on our front steps.Finally this past month, we took it down for good. Old Dave was all for bringing its straight to the dump, but I asked him to wait.I studied its sides and thought candles would look nice shining through its pretty glass.I examined the screw posts sticking up out of its four corners and thought four 99¢ finials would cap those off and serve as ornamentation besides.I turned it over and glued that special felt onto its metal edges so it wouldn’t hurt the table I mean to set it on.Then I set it on that table, nestled this bunch of fall flowers in a short square vase in its center, dropped four tiny tea candles in and lit them with my lighting wand and voila! Once again there was light! And no birds died to furnish it. :-)
The old light by day in its new life as a planter...
and the same light by night with the candles burning
The Tenants
Off and on all spring we’ve had these thumb-sized mice darting around the kitchen baseboards faster than the light from a laser pointer. Off and on all spring we’ve had these shiny black ants using their delicate feelers to probe all the soaps and sponges in the bathroom.What to do? Mousetraps work, sure, especially when baited with peanut butter, but how many mousetraps can you set before you start feeling like a serial killer? How many exquisitely fashioned insect bodies can you crush before you feel twinges of shame?Yet I enter the kitchen nights and see a mouse scooting so fast around the baseboards my eyes can hardly follow it. I enter the bathroom mornings and the place is a-shimmer with ant-dancing.Our problem is we’ve grown tender-hearted enough over the years that we’re much slower to spring for the executioner’s implements. (I once watched as a little spider landed on David’s nose, a tiny thing that began rappelling down toward his chin like a climber descending a cliff-face. He just unhooked that delicate rope of web, went to the door and set the whole thing down outside.)Now, to complicate things even more, a sparrow has built her nest inside the glass globe of our front porch light. We realized it because every time we set foot on the porch we there was this great and general fluttering. It took days before we thought to look over our heads to see where she flew from.We can’t actually see inside the light’s globe – its glass is opaque - but we’re think she’s hatching a family in there. Also, a tiny egg appeared under this light fixture one day, smashed in pieces on the porch floorboards. Poor bird! She didn’t know she lived inside an oven; never guessed how likely it was that a switch could be slipped, wildly overheating her nest. Is this what happened, and the egg was damaged, so she nudged it overboard?Last summer, a mourning dove made her nest on the sill of an upstairs window here and for six straight weeks we watched her sit her eggs and tend her babes – not one, but two separate batches of them. It just took us outside ourselves to watch them; softened our hearts to see the way she came to trust us. We could stand within inches of her, watching through the window glass and she would only regard us calmly as she stooped to feed and nuzzle her struggling offspring.So maybe soon this sparrow will trust us too. Anyway we've taped the light switch in the 'off' position, so no one will again set her nest on Broil. The mice and ants will move out soon, we know, but our thoughts keep returning to this small tenant, who is so like us in a way: who lives and moves and has her being entirely oblivious to the fact that eyes more powerful than she can picture or imagine are daily upon her, watching, to keep her safe. 
Look Up, Dummy
This is me with my new phone. And yes that's my old phone in pieces on the floor beside me. (I bit it; I was mad.)I like this picture because it reminds me how all of us are in this head-bent position all the time. We have so many screens in our lives, so many little gadgets we're poking and peering down at, while all this time the real excitement is happening above our heads.I mean the birds. The birds are going by thick and fast now. I feel like I’m on the tarmac at the airport almost, the big commercial birds and the little private birds, all zooming past. At 6 o'clock this morning the sky was thick with them the way it used to be thick with passenger pigeons in America’s early days when they literally darkened the skies so numerous were they - until those pasty-faced Europeans arrived in the 1600s that is. They shot and ate them by the hundreds of thousands; then shot them and fed them to the pigs; then just plain shot them idly and for sport the way they later shot the buffalo, and in such numbers that by the year 1900 they were all but gone and by 1914 the very last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Sad.No birds are dying up there now though. You look up into the clean late-March skies and find yourself rooting for them, just the way you secretly did the first time you saw Alfred Hitchcock's famous movie.They're ba-a-a-a-ck! Go to the window right now and look up. (And for heaven's sake turn off the phone!)
You Think You’re a Saint but You’re Not
When we got to Venice we were fresh from a visit to Padua and the cathedral shrine to St. Anthony who met St. Francis and demonstrated ever after in his life the power of that man’s example. There, in ancient glass cases, are St. Anthony’s lower jaw, teeth and tongue, the simple tools he used to spread the message relayed to him by one who heard it from one who heard it from one who heard it from One who, going back a good bit, said He heard it from His Dad. What I learned about Anythony in Padua I know I will never forget. But it was his mentor St. Francis I was thinking about as I stood in front of St. Mark’s in Venice the other day. They say the birds flocked to him for his loving heart. They flocked to me for my chunk of bread. One minute I was just standing there, looking around at the brave people who would take some bread, hold it aloft and immediately be as covered with pigeons as the statue of General Patton there by the banks of my favorite River Charles. Maybe I can be brave like that, I thought. So I crouched down and they climbed all over me.
