Memory Lane

One of the other things when I did while in Lawrence was visit my old apartments/houses.

This little stone dandy I shared with 3 other folks, Annika and John and a boy named Kerry. Then he moved out and was replaced by a real jerk whose name escapes me. Annika's folks owned the house. They were from Dubai and her mom told me my toe ring was inappropriate because it meant I was married. Except that I was wearing it wrong because there were supposed to be two, etc. etc. She was actually quite lovely about it, and now I have that little tidbit to dish out. I lived in the basement. Those two little tiny windows at the base of the house? That's me. There used to be a giant tree smack in the middle of the front yard. I wonder why they removed it?

Annika volunteered at a wildlife rehabilitation place, so we always had odd critters in the house--sickly squirrels, baby owls and bats, rabbits with broken legs. . . When I found an abandoned nest of Starlings, though, she told me that the rehab place wouldn't support them--apparently they are considered the cockroaches of the bird world. Or something equally disdained.

She did, however, offer to show me how to take care of them. She showed me how to use a paintbrush to feed and water them (watered down and mushed up dog food--but you really have to jam it down in there. It's. . .disturbing!!), and I took them to work with me every day for at least a week or two in order to feed them every two hours. These were baby baby birds!

When they started to fledge, we put them in a laundry basket and created a screen to place over the top of it. Eventually they got big enough that they could fly up and push the screen off of the basket, and they actually used to fly (hop/flap) around my room and return to the cage on their own. Soon after this we figured it was time to start the release process, so I'd take them out to that front porch and remove the lid from the basket. They'd hop up on the edge and have a look around, but for the first few times, they'd just as quickly hop back in. Soon enough, though, they ventured off the basket's edge and out to that now-missing tree.

For one of the babies, that was that. He (she?) never came back. Just sat in that tree and cried and cried. The other one sat for a few minutes and decided he just wasn't ready for that much of a challenge and came back to the "nest". I left the basket out for a while longer, and while he jumped up to the edge again to sit and ponder the wide world, he didn't fly off. I brought him back inside for the night and we tried again the next day. Maybe he missed his brother/sister, or maybe he'd just decided the time was right. Whatever happened in his little bird brain, he took off for that tree, sat for a few minutes, looked back at me (I swear!), and flew away.

Tomorrow: Apartment #2. . .The Psycho Next Door