Feathered fatality

My summer habit is to open the sliding door to the deck -- and leave it open. I love the fresh air, the summer scents and sounds, and the feeling of bringing the outside in. Plus it's easy to wander back and forth when I water my container gardens.

There used to be a sliding screen door, in addition to the glass one, until our dog crashed through it a few years back. My husband replaced the screen, but the frame was damaged as well, and eventually the whole door fell apart.

We've never gotten around to getting a new screen door, but that hasn't stopped my summer habit. This irritates my husband, who complains that I'm wasting energy and money. We run the A/C, then I open the door and let hot air in, he points out.

This is true. But I just like having the door open. Our deck is on the second floor, with no stairs to the ground, so I've never worried about animals getting into the house. But I forgot about potential winged visitors.

Until I heard a scream from my daughter one evening last week, after she'd gone upstairs to take a post-work shower.

"There's a DEAD BIRD in the bathroom!"

I ran up the stairs. Sure enough, there was a red-winged blackbird lying on the tile floor. I lifted him gently with a cushion of paper towels, hoping to see a flicker of life. But there was none.

"Oh, no," he said. He'd seen the bird flying around the living room, hours earlier when he got up. He tried, in vain, to shoo it back outside, but he had to leave for work so he'd asked our teenage son to take over.

"Why didn't you get the bird back outside?" I asked our son later that night, when he came home.

"I tried for an hour," he said. "But it kept flying up high, where I couldn't reach it, and finally I had to leave."

So the poor bird was left alone and frantic in our house for most of the day. It must have hurled itself against a window, trying to find a way out.

"You just can't leave the door open," my husband scolded.