The Bird Lady

I went to visit my old lady, Caroline, this afternoon. She had another visitor with her, a cousin she said, but the cousin, Sylvia, is 44. We had a good time together, and I stayed longer than my usual 10 minutes – with Sylvia there, we could all chat. I was in hysterics about Caroline and her birds. She encourages the little doves to come into her room, where she feeds them with rice sprinkled on the floor. The doves are quite used to her, and apparently one sat on her head and the other slept on her pillow quite recently. Anyway, when two doves came in, she got up to give them the rice, then spent the next five minutes talking so lovingly to them, Christopher and Mark, she calls them. I was nearly crying I was laughing so hard, though not out loud, but it was just so funny: “Here you go Marky Marky Mark, there’s a goooooooood boy, come on Christopher, oh yes, oh yes.” And so on. When I got back home the boys were sitting outside waiting for me, and Caleb had managed to get a few thorns in his foot, which after much performance on his part I removed with tweezers.