Sunday Morning, November 16, 2008

I sit here in the half dark of my basement room on an early Sunday morning in November. Outside the windows, several small dark men who speak little, if any, English, are clambering up metal ladders and hammering nails in competing rhythms. The church next door, just across our too-narrow driveway with no easement, is having the roof replaced. From November to February, we live in the shadow of this church, the sun too low to shine over the the steep roof over the sanctuary, peaking a full ten feet above the roof of our house.

Every now and then, this particular November, there is a swooshing clatter, a gathering avalanche of shingles thrown down from the ridgepole, down the temporary plywood slides and over a refuse waterfall to the dumpster below (in our driveway). We are on Day Five of the roof replacement, all day every day since the rain stopped. They are removing three layers of shingles, revealing and removing, the original dark brown-gray wood shingles of the roof. For short periods of time, the sanctuary is exposed to the sky. I wonder if those men look down at the altar as they skip about on 2x6 crossbeams 40 feet above the pews, before slamming down another sheet of plywood and roofing fabric.

The cats are upset by the disturbance. Tasha disappears for hours at a time; Harry stalks around the house, meowing for me. If I'm in my room with them, they calm, but it takes a while. A short time ago, I had been sitting at my desk for several minutes when Harry gave another nervous mew. I turned to respond; he was sitting, tightly hunched, on a throw rug behind my chair. He was surrounded, I realized, by debris.

I look more closely -- not debris, exactly, but feathers. Dozens of fluffy gray feathers, cut with a few finely-edged tail feathers. There has been another interaction between cat and bird, but this time it was with Tasha, not Harry.

I knew about the bird, although I hadn't realized there had been any time with it in this corner of my room. This morning at dawn I was woken from a drugged slumber (literally -- I'm dosing with Nyquil nightly to sleep through a cold) by the sense of a rush of a fluttering, and the brush of a cat's winter coat on my cheek. I flung myself out of bed, turning round to see Tasha poised on the headboard like a furry vulture, looking down at an alert sparrow perching on my pillow.

With the presence of mind borne of a head emptied by doxylamine succinate, I simply threw a nightgown (grabbed from the laundry pile) over the bird. It did not struggle when I picked it up, and I could feel its heartbeat through the thin fabric. Standing outside in the pinked-gray of dawn, I unwrapped the bundle, unfolding layers of white cotton jersey from my half-closed fist, until I revealed the bird's feet pushing up from its heaving, belly. The bird twisted itself upright in my hand and then stopped. We stared at each other, its brown eyes ringed in a striped corona of gray and brown, my own eyes red-veined from antihistamine. It sized me up, and looked some more, as I looked at it, and then it flew off, leaving a puddle of fear in my hand.