The birds return | Ammi Midstokke
Last week, my kid came home from college with a gaggle of adolescents in various stages of their descent into, or ascent out of, Goth. Or whatever label might be attached to their penchant for red latex platform boots, or black hair, or piercings, or questions like, “Do you know Metallica?” as if I’d grown up in a haze of Olivia Newton John records.
They came flocking in, like the return of the song birds, with equal noise and lack of reason.
The birds have begun their annual territorial campaign to attack themselves against my windows. Each morning, I hear the impotent thump-thwack against a pane, and peer into the room to see what the raucous is about, as a chickadee repeatedly launches itself head-first against the glass. He flies off then to some distant branch, then charges again with all the machismo of a bow tie.
No one has told chickadees their name, or they would recognize that they are no threat, even to themselves.
The window-thwunking has a different potential life-saving benefit for the birds: My diabolical cat is wholly entertained by sitting on the floor and watching them. Her tail twitches and she makes some primal chirping noises of her own, as if any minute that bird will fly right into the bathroom for her taking.
When a bird makes a fatal collision against a window, the cat knows this noise is different, and slinks out the cat door to find the twitching tragedy, and claim it as a prize. I try to save them in paper bags, because a reader told me to do that, and it sometimes works. I’ll place the bird in a paper bag and bring it inside so it is warm, then forget about it until the bag starts making its way across the house.
Nature and teenagers are always correcting my assumptions. The two have a lot in common: Neither will be controlled, they remain mostly unpredictable, and both can make me want to crawl in bed and hide, or laugh out loud with joy.
The cat, like my teenager, leaves a detritus of carnage all through my house. While sweeping the laundry room and jabbing at the cat door to detach what I thought was a hair ball, I managed to smear the blood carcass of something down the wall and across the floor. It was like the stairwell walls of a horror movie. For rodents. So is my door mat on most days: a vole head, a foot, some pile of innards deemed unfit for consumption that day.
People talk about their cats leaving them presents, but I assure you this cat has never, and will never, make a display of affection or generosity. She is of the feline sort that believes we are her servants or scratching posts, and mostly a nuisance by our presence. Which is not dissimilar from how teenagers handle us.
For the three days my home turned into a frat-sorority house, the countertops were strewn with all manner of plastic cups. I cannot say whether I was more horrified by the sheer volume of trash they were producing, or the amount of sugar and caffeine they were consuming. Leftover iced lattes with whipped cream, energy drinks, and fast food soda cups littered all horizontal surfaces in blatant disregard for my ban on bad foods.
In my child’s independence, autonomy – if not outright rebellion – has been established primarily through chicken nuggets and something called “Lotus drinks.” The latter appears to be a blend of corn syrup, food coloring, uppers, and glitter.
Despite this drip-feed of stimulants, none of them were awoken by the bird banging and bashing that has become my morning alarm. Mostly because the woodpeckers seem to be sleeping-in this time of year. Like me, they struggle with Daylight Savings.
The youths don’t start their day until lunch time, and emerged from their slumber bleary eyed and in need of pancakes. As they trickled forth, the stillness of my morning home came to life. Someone started playing a guitar in the living room. Another made tea. A request for lattes snuck around the corner of my office door, where I was listening to the noise of their species thriving in their natural habitat: Quiet conversations that grew louder, chuckles that turned to laughter, numbers that grew until all of them were a crescendo of song and possibility echoing off the walls and ceilings.
Just as abruptly as my empty nest had filled, it was abandoned again. A bed was left unmade. The muddy prints of Converse trailed across the floors. The trash can overflowed with cups and containers and chip bags. The only sound was my cat sharpening its claws, and a bird, thumping against the window in its determination to cause a teensy-tiny traumatic brain injury.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com