Bird Break

            Last week I was happily adding new bits to a piece I call "the never-ending novel" (first conceived around 1987, still far from finished).

            Doing so these days relies on a Yucatec hammock hanging in a patio enclosed on three sides. The fourth side gives on to a small, grassy yard, surrounded by a vine-covered stone wall and large trees and bromeliads. There's an aging black cat who shares the patio for his food and water. The cat is inclined to open one or both of the screen doors that lead into the house from the patio. He does not, of course, then close the screens again.

            The occasional bird, usually a kind of collared dove or  a grackle, shares the cat's food with the cat's tacit consent. The birds have determined me to be irrelevant. They calmly pass under the hammock to get to the cat food without sparing so much as a glance for me.

            Perfect for concentration, right? Except when... A sudden explosion of wing lift-off from the vicinity of the cat's dish ripped me out of a  monk's cell in the 15th century. I did not see the bird passing over me toward the trees, and glancing toward the screens leading into the dining area, I saw--with a sinking feeling--that they were open.

            My characters were left to fend for themselves. Cautiously, I peered into the house, just in time to see a collared dove zoom toward a large screened window; meeting resistance, it then swooped back through the living room and ascended to a small (and like the other, unopenable) square window, high above the floor, meant to give natural light to an otherwise dark space. And there it battled the glass until, worn out, it simply perched on the sill, looking out at the Caribbean sky.

Collared Dove rests on light

            The next two hours were spent trying to devise a means to help the bird  escape. The large window had to be covered, and all of the screen doors, opened (with crossed fingers that no other birds would join the dove in the interim), along with the heavy front door which was underneath the dove's chosen roosts . Plural, because it moved from the sill to a  ceiling light, between its repeated futile bouts of trying to escape through the same small window.

            Finally, with the help of a long metal pole and at the cost of  a (to me)  traumatic encounter that involved much beating of wings and fluttering and falling feathers, the bird dropped to the floor. Where it immediately saw the open front door. With great aplomb and admirable indifference, it calmly walked out into the afternoon.

            I hadn't really provided for a bird break on my writing schedule, but sometimes life just  goes its own way, doesn't it?