Nature Red in Its Abundance
I came home and slept in my childhood room and the first night I heard all the stritchy-stratchies above my head, I thought, "Got to be birds, please not rats, just birds." I opened my window that morning and dried grass fell in at the frame. Birds. There was a nest. Not just a nest, but baby birds above my head, in the attic, and they had to go. We had to kill them. The second night, after all this had been ascertained, I slept in the basement. I went for a run in the mountains the day we had to take them out. I didn't want to be in the house. And isn't that funny? I'm not a vegetarian. I know that animals die, sometimes not even out of strictest need. We're just one generation removed from the time when kittens were thrown into the river. Have we gotten squeamish? Ought we to have? I'm not too sensitive to know that there is a lot of death involved in life, but I want to be far away from it. I don't want to push out the nest myself. I don...