Due to the English language's uncharacteristic lack when it comes to a reasonably quotidian equivalent of "defecation" and "poop," we will be visiting that much-loved Old English derivative "shit."
Yesterday, I found bird shit on my kitchen counter.
Why? you ask.
Because a bird shat on my kitchen counter.
I ran home yesterday morning, just as the lunch siren sounded, to change clothes from my slightly artsy/almost professional attire to track pants and a "Just Do It" shirt so I could attend the Junior High volleyball game, up at Yuinooka Dome. One of the teachers invited me, and since I'm always complaining that they never tell me ANYTHING that goes on (which they don't, by the way, with few exceptions), I felt particularly obliged to present an officially supportive ALT face.
Back to the bird shit.
I threw some clothes on the floor, threw some clothes on the floor, and grabbed my water bottle with the intention of filling it up from the kitchen sink. As I rounded the corner, I realized a small feathery mouse was having a heart attack against the kitchen window. Natural, I supposed, since at this time of year they sometimes go a bit crazy eating fermented berries and things. One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is birds crashing into the kitchen window after consuming too much linden berry for their body weight, and then recklessly going for a fly.
Then I realized that this ape-shit aviator was inside my house, trying madly to escape.
Now, I live in inaka. That's code for that place in The Air Up There that crows won't even both to shit on. So I have seen my fair share of wildlife, critters, and pests, inside establishments and outside.
I have had cockroaches timidly invade my kitchen sink from behind the little aluminum separation that clearly does not do its job of separating the roaches from the kitchen sink. (He ran screaming in circles around the sink. I ran screaming in circles around the kitchen. We both exhausted ourselves screaming and running in circles and then I caught him in an old jar, covered it with a net, and thrust it into a garbage bag, before hurtling it outside and down the stairs, where unfortunately it still rests, behind the bike stand.)
I had a huntsman spider come spend the weekend in the guest tatami room, until I got my neighbor to evict him on the grounds that I refrain from eating meat in the house, excepting fish, and he would eat anything that wandered unknowingly into his web. We had incompatible lifestyle choices. It would never have worked.
I have seen rats and mice in other buildings, and outside several restaurants. (Never in my house! knock on wood and refill traps...)
I have heard many horror stories about millipedes, centipedes, mukade, although they've had the good taste not to speak to me in public without a formal introduction.
I have even had a shower of tiny ants recently, driven inside by the onset of rainy season.
But a bird is a horse of a different color. (Light brown, with whitish and darkish markings, presumably to assist as camouflage in the underbrush of the suburban outback.)
We stood there, trembling, heaving and flapping our wings at each other, wondering how the hell we were going to liberate Tommy the Sparrow (or whatever that character's name was) from his hell-hole that is my galley-sized kitchen. It was his own damn fault for getting in here, but as usually happens with me and my proteges, I took the responsibility to get him out.
After staring at his pain and flurry for a few moments, I remembered that I have a kitchen door that leads out to the balcony. I never open it, except in moments like this to get rid of unwanted house guests. Since my last house guest was my mother, and the one before that was about a year and a half ago, you can see how I might have forgotten this door exists.
I stepped forward tremulously, bending as far backward as possible to keep Willy! That was his name, Willy the Sparrow! out of my face. He spent this time whining and crying about his life imprisonment behind a cheap pane of shatter-proof glass.
Whoosh! I threw the door open and waited.
That moron just stood there, trying his damnedest to get out the closed window. I can't open that window. The handle must have broken, oh, I don't know, when they put it in. It NEVER opens.
Stupid dragon.
With a running monologue of "C'mon you stupid animal, get out, get out, get out, ohmyfuck'sake, you dumb bird, aauuuuughhhh!" I gently shooed him to the threshold, whereupon he realized his good fortune and took off like a bat out of hell.
I went to the volleyball game. It was only when I came home that I found out how, in his mindless terror, Willy had a spat of projectile diarrhea all over my kitchen (and the shower window, which was how he got in the house in the first place).
I've had it with nature. They make the worst guests.
