Wow guys. This will be an era for the history books, huh!
I’m sitting in my living room. It’s Day 10 of Lebanese lockdown. Every day there’s news of another nation following suit. I’m working from home while blowing through my classical music album collection, drinking copious amounts of tea, reading reading reading, assembling a 1,000 piece puzzle, and generally just puttering around my apartment.
But wait…isn’t that basically what I do most days? Being an introvert who lives alone, I practice self-isolation pretty regularly. Imagine my surprise to learn that this lifestyle is actually called 'self-quarantine'. Huh…
In addition to working from home and trying not to bake too much (since no one is around to eat the results except me), I’m trying to not let my mind descend into total Netflix lethargy. It’s hard though. I appreciate solitude, but two weeks of it is a bit much to be honest. I’m starting to get a little nutty.
Thankfully, I have a bird story to tell y’all.
Because people are mostly staying put, the air quality in Beirut has been amazing. I spend a lot of time on my balcony just looking out over the blue Mediterranean and thinking gosh, the coronavirus may be decimating our economy, but it’s sure doing wonders for the environment. Anyway, because of all of this clean air, a relatively unusual phenomenon has surfaced in the form of birds hanging outside my terrace door. Yesterday morning, two of them were fluttering around, pecking at the window, and pooping all over my outdoor chairs (the audacity!). Every time I approached they’d fly away, only to return a few minutes later. Annoying, but whatever. The earth is happy.
This morning, I woke up to a strange noise. I went into the guest bedroom (where my terrace door is) only to discover that one of yesterday’s birds had flown in through the crack and was flapping around in disoriented fashion. I’m a city girl, right, so I don’t always know what to do when undomesticated animals find their way into my house. I slid the door all the way open, thinking the bird would find its way out. But for some reason, this bird - who had found it fully doable to fly through the barely-big-enough crack between the sliding door and the wall - could not for the life of it find its way out through the now wide open doorway. Instead it flew into my bedroom where I rushed to open the balcony door, hoping it would find its way out there. But no, it smashed into the wall just above the door, then into my mirror on the opposite wall, then Ianded in the corner and stayed there for a bit.
I approached very slowly and tried to pick it up (let’s face it, I’m just as scared of the bird as the bird is of me), but I didn’t get a good enough grip before the bird freaked out and flapped around some more, this time knocking itself out by rushing headlong into the mirror again. It landed on my dresser, breathing heavily and twitching a bit, its neck at a peculiar angle. So I picked it up and placed it outside on the terrace, hoping it wouldn’t die on me but also lacking the necessary bird resuscitation skills to prevent said death. (I’ll spare you the video version that shows it twitching as some of you are sensitive people and might experience trauma.)
I returned to my bed, trying not to get neurotic about this bird possibly dying on my terrace. I peeked in on it a couple of times. At one point it had ended up on its back several inches away from where I’d placed it. Still breathing heavily. Still twitching.
And I’m thinking to myself, Dear God, I really can’t handle a bird death right now. Too many emotions for the current situation.
A couple of hours later I checked up on it again, and this time the bird was looking decidedly more put together, even though it was still on its back. I got closer, thinking I could try to turn it over so it would at least be on its feet. But before I could reach down, it miraculously flipped over and flew promptly away.
So that’s that. The bird is alive, I’m alive; we're on our backs, we're breathing heavily, some of us are twitching. But we’re all going to survive this Covid-19 madness. Hang in there.
