Visit from an old friend (also titled, "The Bird Weekend")

My old friend from college came to see me. Well, there were two reasons she came, one was to see me and the second was to retrieve a theater chair that she won on ebay and had me pick up for her. So she arrives about 12:30 and I open the front door and she steps in to give me a hug. We are in mid-hug and all of the sudden I hear a flapping of something right by my ear and brushing my hair. I exclaim, "What was that?", loudly and slightly frightened.

She says, "It hit me. I felt it on my neck."

"Do you think it was a bat? It must have been a bat." Now I am becoming concerned. "Did it come in the house?"

Shakey voice, "I think so.", she says.

"KENNETH!!!", I scream, knowing that I could possibly wake the house up but now there is a bat in my house, and I am not sure I care.

Kenneth comes down the stairs a bit groggy from being asleep for the past hour. "What, oh hi Lel" he says.

We explain the story and at first he doesn't seem ready to believe us until Lella says it might be better if she stayed in a hotel. He goes and gets a flashlight, leaving the two ladies, trembling now in the hallway where this animal could very well be. He returns a few minutes later with a large flashlight and hands it to me and he closes the kitchen doors blocking off the rest of the house from the kitchen, or was it the kitchen from the rest of the house? Anyway, he then sends ME up to check out the kids rooms and close their doors. I look at him funny, ME? I wonder, and then exclaim "why me? I don't really want to find it and what do I do if I do find it?" He doesn't answer and pushes me up the steps.

I find nothing, thankfully. And when I return to the downstairs hallway he convinces us that it must have flown out and that it realized that it wasn't flying away and we must have deflected it from coming inside. There is nothing inside the house. We reluctantly, and may I repeat, reluctantly believe him. We want to believe him. But we also don't want to wake to a bat sucking our blood or hanging upside down in the morning from a curtain. Shivers run up my back and Kenneth heads back upstairs to bed.

I look at Lella and ask, "would you like a glass of wine?" She says something like "hell yeah".

I open the kitchen door and am greeted by a little bird standing on the floor in the kitchen. I let out a shreak and when I scream I startle the bird and he starts to fly and then I start screaming again. It was all I could do to get the door shut again. Thank goodness it wasn't a bat! But there is a bird in the house.

Kenneth returns with Caroline's butterfly net and her safari hat. (see picture) He devises a plan to trap the bird in our back hallway and catch it but the plan involves me too. I have to hold up a sheet in the doorway to the family room so he doesn't go in there. I hold the sheet he scares the bird, Lella sits quietly in the living room thinking of many excuses why she should go to a hotel. The bird flies down the hallway, flaps up against the sheet, I start screaming again because the sheet is now flapping on my head and face, and then "THWAP". Nothing, no sound, no flapping, no screaming.

"Got it." Kenneth says.

"Got what?", I ask.

"The bird. I got the bird. It's okay you can come out now."

"No way. Get it out of the house now!", I say.

"Really, Whitney, I've got it. I was a tennis pro you know. Come look at it."

"Tennis pro? What does that have to do with it?", still behind the sheet.

"I caught it in the net. Get out here and look at this thing. He is little." Reluctantly I pull down the sheet ever so slowly and there it was in the net.

Next thing to do, obviously was get the camera. We call Lella in and she responded something like, "I don't need to see it. I'm okay. Don't want to see it." But with more prodding she came in and checked it out too.

What an exciting entrance!