On Friday afternoon, I was curled up in my chair reading the latest Jen Lancaster book* and Maverick was sleeping on the back of the couch, in front of the window, when we both jumped at the sound of something smacking our bow window.

I looked up in time to see a burst of feathers swirling in the air and some goo splattered over the glass.

Maverick had already put his head down to go back to sleep but I had to investigate further, so I walked over to the window for a closer look. What I saw was a splat of yellow goo, streaking across the glass, with a bunch of feathers stuck to it.

Of course, my first instinct was to tweet about it.**

Then I sat there, under the stain of bird innards, and decided the best course of action:

I should probably go and clean that up.  But the bird is, most surely, dead and lying under the window and if I go out to clean the window I’ll have to deal with dead bird and I just don’t think I can handle that.  But the house is for sale and I don’t want potential buyers to walk in and look out our big beautiful windows and see nothing but bird entrails.  But the longer it sits there, baking in the sun, the harder it will be to clean.  I really should just go out there and clean it…

And then I decided to leave it for Phil. 

I curled back up with my book, but my eyes kept wandering over to the bird guts on the window, and after reading the same paragraph 8 times and still having no idea what it said, I figured I should just man up and clean it.

I grabbed the Windex and some extra thick paper towel (to provide maximum padding between me and the bird goo) and, needing to know exactly what I was walking into, slowly opened the front door and peeked around the frame to check for bird remnants.

There was nothing there!

How did that bird leave half of its cerebrospinal fluid on my window and live to fly away?  You go, little birdie!  Fly on, my little friend!

But as I took a step out, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye, on my deck.  Then, like a fool, I looked directly at it.  It took me a minute for my brain to process that the sparrow was, in fact, dead and was lying 15 feet away from the scene of the collision.

Directly in front of me.

Right on my doorstep like some sort of bird mob warning.

I let out a squeak and jumped back into the house, slamming the door.

Phil can definitely take care of that shit; I am not moving a bird carcass.  No thank you!

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I kept checking through the glass to make sure it wasn’t just stunned and had, miraculously healed itself and flew away.

Nope, still there.

I couldn’t wait for Phil – he wouldn’t be home for hours and I couldn’t leave it lying there like some grim welcoming committee for anyone who ventures up to my front door.

So I pulled on my big girl panties, took a deep breath and opened the door.

First things first, without looking directly at it, I stepped over the still-dead bird and went to the window.  I was relieved that the guts cleaned up relatively easily, and I congratulated myself for not procrastinating until it dried and then required some sort of scraper to remove the stuck on bits.

When I could stall no more (my windows are crazy clean now), I turned to the bird.  There was no way I was picking it up, so I walked across my lawn and picked up a sturdy, fallen branch from the elm tree in front of our house.  I walked back, up my steps to the fallen sparrow, closed my eyes for a moment and paid my last respects.***

And then I flicked it off my step with the branch and went back to my book.

*Awesome.  Read it.

**Irony anyone?

***It turns out birds seem much less evil when I know there is no chance for it to peck my eyes out.