Long Time - I have a Story

Hi all - I have been doing stuff which I will blog about later. Blogging has not been on my radar too much lately so apologies.

Today I will tell a story that I told a friend of mine today when he called and asked how things were. Follow me here.

About a month before I turned 18 I graduated from boarding school and moved to Boston with my eventually-to-be-first-ex-husband. I was to enter Boston College in the fall and we moved there in early June.

On June 30 1980 I turned 18 and for my birthday my man got me a beautiful little parakeet. I named him Keats after the poet. He was very tame and had the full run of the basement apartment where we lived. He was put inside his cage at night but when I was in the apartment he had the full run of the house.

In the autumn after he came to us the apartment developed a fly problem which is pretty usual for Boston. One day I bought a roll of flypaper and hung it in the "window" of the kitchen. Keats was outside his cage and I was writing a paper and all of a sudden Keats started flying down the short hallway towards the kitchen. As I saw him fly I understood immediately what was going to happen. I ran to the kitchen and Keats had flown directly into the flypaper! By the time I got there 3 seconds later he had already flapped himself into a very bad situation. Bad. Very bad.

I looked at this beautiful little bird wrapped in unforgivingly sticky death paper and my heart dropped. I realized then and there that I had two choices.

1. I could take down the strip of fly paper with Keats wrapped in it but still very much alive and throw him in the trash bin and live with that the rest of my life. or
2. I could deal with it 100% to the very best of my ability even though the situation seemed hopeless.

I went with #2. A centimeter at a time I pulled the paper off his tiny beautiful body. Most of his feathers came with it and I am sure it was so very painful for him. When we finally finished he was still sticky and could not live like that so I doused him in flour. This was just a guess on my part but it worked and over the next months he managed to preen the sticky gunk off and his feathers regrew and he lived a long and healthy beautiful life.

I bring this up because it was a life lesson that I remember almost daily.

I woke up this morning with an impossible job before me. I wanted to just throw it away but I knew if I did it would haunt me forever. So I decided to peel the flypaper of despite the pain and give it a chance.

Tonight I do indeed hurt and I have many feathers gone but they will grow back and this lesson will continue to bring me through the rough times.