We exited the grocery store through the big automatic sliding doors. I felt the heat of the sun beat down on my five year-old shoulders as I walked hand in hand with my mother towards our car in the parking lot. All of a sudden, there was a wet impact on my head, as though someone had chucked a clump of soft mud at my skull. I cried out, with all of my five year-old might, “Hey, don’t throw mud at me!” to whoever might have hurled the ball of gushiness at my little head. But within seconds, the said “mud” began to drip down my forehead, into my eyes and down my neck, creeping into my shirt, making it moist and hot. This “mud” was streaked with white. This “mud” smelled really sick. This “mud” was in fact bird turd. I had been CRAPPED on by a lousy bird flying overhead. I started crying, and my mom dragged me to the car where she tried to peel the pooey shirt off of me. It was a bad experience, and thus began my hate-hate relationship with birds.

A few years later I was in the living room in the little bungalow I grew up in, and all of a sudden my mom started shrieking that there was a bird in the house! She grabbed a bed sheet and was trying to shoo it out the window, then she hastily threw me and my brother into my bedroom and closed the door. Peeking under the the crack at the bottom of the door, I saw her flailing around, screaming in fright, trying to get the bird out of the house. After a few minutes, the screaming stopped, as did the flapping of the bed sheet, and she came and retrieved us from the bedroom. We were both crying, and afraid that our mother had been eaten by the killer bird. Mom said that she was “pretty sure” she got the bird out. We all breathed a sigh of relief and went on our merry ways.

The next morning, I was eating my toast with peanut butter downstairs watching TV, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a bird walking along the ledge in our basement. I hurled my toast to the ground and sprinted upstairs yelling, “The birdie’s back, Mom! The birdie’s back!!”

Eventually, my mom managed to get the blasted bird out of the house for good, and we somehow survived the trauma.

I still hate birds.

I flinch when one flies too near to me and I can hear the flapping of its wings, and I imagine its bony claws getting tangled in my hair, and its pointy beak pecking at my neck.

Birds, stay away!