11/11/2013

so, here comes the cold. snow tomorrow. the boy is spending the day with our 90 year old storm windows. charming when we bought the house, but it’d be nice to be able to not have to spend an entire day putting them in place, and also to have the ability to open them on a warm, sunny day. but nope, jail time begins now.

Here’s something horrible that happened that i haven’t been able to post on facebook. Harold’s bird died Saturday morning. On Thursday, she demanded to be handfed sunflower. On Friday, she spent the entire day singing loudly and foraging through the different fruits and veggies in her treat bowl. She let me pet her head, and sat on the boy’s hand for a 20 seconds. On Saturday, when I woke up, I knew something was wrong. She tried to chirp at me and couldn’t. She had this weird little tic thing going, like a small little hop with each heartbeat.  Boy tried to move her cage into the sunroom so she could have a full panoramic view of outside…. halfway there, she fell of her perch. When he picked her up and she didn’t fight him, we knew it was bad… and a few seconds later, she passed in his hands. I spent the day sobbing audibly, probably a bit much for a bird that was only ‘ours’ for a week, but … man. We took her in to help Harold, and she was the last little piece of our friendship with our kind old neighbor next door.  We buried her in a sunny spot under Harold’s old apple tree with some of her favorite treats, and I decorated her grave with orange mums and fuschia wild petunia. And we dumped the rest of her bird seed all around the base of the tree so all of the little neighborhood birds that she’d been chirping at all week will come and visit her. I haven’t called Sharon yet. I just can’t. I will, but not today. Poor, sweet Gypsy Lee Rose. In only a week, we’d made so much progress together.