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The Slim Dandy Renovation
This doesn't have to be a metaphor, it could simply be the way things are. On the other hand it does make a dandy metaphor: the pigeon poop inside my new kitchen.
I know pigeons ain't nothing but rats with wings but in the wake of recent local teenage killings, and the disappearance of one of our inside cats, and at the same time the disappearance of the newborn outside kittens (great-great grandchildren of Point Blank) from the Point Blank clan, I just could not kick that pregnant pigeon out of her nest above one of my still glassless kitchen windows. I either am a heartless bastard or, for sure, on occasion can be a heartless bastard, but I did not have what it took to do that deed. I feel like I'm being punked by the PETA people, or am suffering from an ingrown conscience, or am paying the balloon on my Karmic debts for shooting those moles with Jeff Franzen's BB gun out near Lake O' the Pines in East Texas thirty years ago.
I've avoided the kitchen for weeks now, instead working on the outside, breaking out the old broken glass window panes so the neighborhood kids won't be so tempted to vandalize (which has me thinking again of my own childhood and yet more Karmic debt). And I have been scraping the windows down to their cypress beginning, all as part of preliminary efforts in what will be the replacing and reglazing of 112 panes of glass.
So yesterday I'm outside on a small scaffold working on the miniature double set of windows above what will be the kitchen sink, and I can see across the kitchen to the other window, above which, on the now exposed framing header, sits the nest. And the grown pigeon is in her nest acting in a way that I will only describe as "unladylike." But soon she leaves the nest unattended, which from my recent observations is an unheard of thing because previously she would only leave after another pigeon (the male?) came to take her place (to sit on the egg, I guess). The settng sun is working against my vision but after some correctional squinting I can see that in the nest is indeed a newborn. A glorious thing, this new birth, but also, I wish I were a geek (or more of one) so I could go in there and bite its little head off. But it's not going to happen that way so I'm left pondering how many days now till this young bird will leave the nest? And who's going to clean up that cumulative pile of poop on the floor?