Sun and clouds mixed. High 88F. Winds light and variable..

Cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds light and variable.

I was talking with my mother the other day. She lives on a farm in a small town outside Philadelphia. It’s a beautiful area, and I often feel bad for not getting up to see her more than I do, which is rarely. All three of my sisters live in Pennsylvania, but not in the same town. We all at one time lived together in Greensboro. I’m the only one who didn’t end up north.

When I started at the News of Orange, my mom and oldest sister bought subscriptions to the paper. They receive their papers, on average, a week after the issue comes out, but it’s not like they’re combing Word On the Street for things to do on the weekend. The seven hour drive keeps them from visiting much, too.

That said, my mother does pay attention to the stories. She’s an animal lover and once, after a story ran in the paper about needs at the Orange County Animal Services, my mom made a donation to the shelter.

But that day we weren’t talking about anything news-related. Just family tidbits, about what the grandkids are doing, and what her great-grandkids are doing.

Suddenly, from her end of the phone, I hear a man yell, “Get out!”

“What’s going on?” I said. 

“That’s just Ned (my stepdad) yelling at the vultures,” my mom responded. “They’re stealing the food meant for the other animals.”

The other day, while I was sitting at my desk — which faces a window that looks out across King Street and the Old Orange County Courthouse, I noticed seven or eight vultures gathered on the grass. This committee didn’t appear to be eating anything, but rather exploring the grounds, like tourists. The next day, I parked my car directly in front of the courthouse and saw another small group of vultures, maybe a new group. Maybe the same, who knows? Again, they were just wandering about.

An apartment I lived in when I was in my 20s, was on the second floor of a historic red, brick building. It had radiators and no air conditioning. There was a fire escape off my kitchen windows. I had a cat and would sometimes leave open my kitchen window to let him sit on the fire escape when I was doing my evening shift at the daily newspaper. I often wouldn’t get home until 2 a.m.

One early morning after work, I got home and found three pigeons in my kitchen.

The kitchen was small and narrow. It had a few cabinets, a single sink with an area for a dish-drying rack. There was a thin four-burner stove and an equally thin refrigerator. I had added a microwave stand and microwave, and a wicker bistro table with two chairs.

The most notable feature of my small kitchen were the two side-by-side windows. They were old and tall, I could stand in them. Above them was another window — like a transom — that spanned the two windows below. It had a ledge that was deep enough on which to set small potted plants. 

That’s where I found the pigeons. They were sleeping. I peered into my bedroom and found my cat, who was also sleeping. This was the second time I’d come home from work to find a winged and unexpected guest. There was only one the previous time, and I was able to throw a towel over it and release it out the window.

This time, though, I knew I wouldn’t be able to catch all three of the pigeons at once, so I put on a hat and prepared for lots of flapping. It took about 30 minutes to get them out. I tried to be delicate with them while the birds panicked. I remember seeing my cat, at one point, looking just as panicked as the birds.

(For what it’s worth, “Pigeons In My Kitchen” would make a fine Shel Silverstein book title.)

As I swept about 50 soft, tiny feathers that were on the floor in my kitchen, I noticed bird seed under the windows. It was in the window sill, too. I crawled out onto the fire escape and looked around, and then up. I could see on the floor of the metal landing directly above were two aluminum circles. I guessed they were pans filled with bird seed.

The woman who lived in the apartment directly above mine was named Evelyn. I would guess she was in her 80s, and she lived alone. The first time I met her was when she knocked on my door one afternoon. I opened it to find an elderly woman with an unlit cigarette in her mouth.

“Hi, can I help….” I said before she shut me off.

“Is Lee there?” Lee was the previous tenant of my apartment.

“No, she moved out abo…”

“Do you have a lighter?”

“No, I’m afrai…” She didn’t cut me off this time, I just stopped talking out of anticipation. Evelyn gave me a look that told me I’d failed at everything in life, and would continue to do so for decades. She turned, silently, and walked away slowly. The shuffling of her slippered feet echoed in the hallway, and then I heard her methodically climb the stairs to her third-floor apartment.

The second time I spoke with Evelyn I was walking out the door of my apartment building just as she was going in. She was carrying a gallon of milk. She had three flights of stairs to climb with that milk, so I spoke up.

“Can I carry that upstairs for you?” I said.

“I can do it,” she snapped back. I never said she couldn’t do it. I had doubts about whether she alone could finish an entire gallon of milk before it expired, but I figured she could carry it upstairs. I was just trying to save her some time.

Outside of those two interactions, my relationship with Evelyn consisted of hearing her very slowly climb the stairs to her place, and the times I would hear the sound of her playing her Hammond organ. I couldn’t tell the level of her ability on the organ. She wasn’t a beginner, but she also didn’t play anything that sounded complicated, and nothing I recognized. Mostly it sounded like a mixture of between-innings-minor-league-baseball-meets-Vincent Price.

The afternoon after finding three pigeons in my kitchen, I walked up to Evelyn’s door and knocked. The door opened almost immediately, like she had been waiting for me. I took a couple of steps backward.

She was small, oval-shaped, with thin gray hair, and rimless glasses. She had a lit cigarette between her fingers. Evelyn looked at me and didn’t say a word.

“Hi,” I blurted, “sorry to bother you, but the birds you’re feeding on the fire escape keep dropping seeds into my kitchen window, and then the birds go into my kitchen and can’t get out.”

She looked at me, drew deeply from her cigarette, and continued staring at me.

“There were three birds in my kitchen last night, and it’s the second time I’ve had birds in my apartment,” I continued. “I was able to get all of them out, but I was really worried about possibly hurting them.” I was now babbling, thinking the more words I used the more places I could hide should she lunge forward at me. 

She exhaled smoke. I’d forgotten the smoke was even in there. 

“What?” she said, never breaking eye contact.

I began explaining again, but she cut me off. “I heard you,” she said putting the cigarette in corner of her mouth and leaving it like a handbag on the back of a chair. She backed into her apartment and began to close her door.

“You’ll need to move the trays,” she snapped, shutting the door as an exclamation point, and then sliding the chain lock as another, unnecessary exclamation point.

Back in my kitchen, I raised the window and climbed onto the fire escape. When I first moved into that apartment, the fire escape was what sold me on the place. It didn’t have A/C, the walls were filthy, and the bathroom was tiny, but I felt like I could be a character in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” sitting out on my personal, second-floor porch, talking with friends.

In the two years I lived there, I never once shared the space with another human. My cat and I would sit out there, and I would read. My metal perch faced a Presbyterian church and its parking lot. One afternoon, while I was reading on the fire escape, a young woman parked in the church parking lot. She wasn’t going to the church; she was a student at UNC-Greensboro, which was a few blocks away. She was doing what many other UNCG students did to avoid parking fees: parking illegally.

She looked up at me and waved. I started to wave back, but first checked behind me, just in case someone she knew had managed to get into my apartment, climbed onto the fire escape, and stand behind me. She turned with her bag of books and walked toward the school, and I made a decision to be in that exact same place at that exact same time, everyday, forever if necessary.

I climbed the ladder to the third-floor fire escape right off Evelyn’s kitchen window. She could easily have opened her window and brought in the two trays of bird seed. She wouldn’t have had to crawl out onto the landing; there was no danger involved for her to bring it in. I think she just didn’t want to do it. Nevertheless, I removed the trays.

Although I never again had birds in my kitchen, that was not the last of my encounters with Evelyn. One evening, there was a knock on my door. I opened it and found her standing in a light blue nightgown and cream-colored slippers. Down the front of Evelyn’s gown was a light brown stain speckled with what looked like coffee grounds. It ran from her top button to the fringe of her clothes.

Before I could ask her what happened, she blurted out “I need you to call an ambulance. I’m sick.”

I immediately kicked into caring-neighbor mode, pledging to call immediately and stay with her until the ambulance arrived, get her anything she needed. I was saying these things as I retrieved my phone, which had a cord that stretched to the door.

The 9-1-1 dispatch had questions that only Evelyn could answer, and when I returned to the door to ask them, she was gone. I could hear her climbing the stairs to return to her apartment. Once the ambulance was on the way, I went up to let Evelyn know help coming.

Her door was open, and I walked in. I’d never been in her home. I called out to her. The layout of her apartment was similar to mine. She wasn’t in her kitchen or her bedroom. I walked to the living room and found her sitting in a chair. She had two large bird cages on each side of a window that had long curtains. Each cage contained a bird. I’m not familiar with types of birds, so I assumed they were cockatiels. Bird seeds were on the floor beneath the cages. The furniture was antique, or whatever age Evelyn was.

The Hammond organ was in a corner facing the wall. There was a sofa, a chair, a couple of tables with lamps, an old TV, an area rug, and a puddle of vomit.

“EMS is on the way,” I said to her as I watched the two birds looking as vacant as Evelyn, like it was a three-way staring contest. “I’m … going to go downstairs to make sure they find the building. Are you OK?”

She didn’t answer, but her eyes were still open, and she was fiddling with her hands.

Moments later, my apartment building was splashed with red lights from the ambulance. I greeted the EMTs, told them where Evelyn was, how she came to me, and what I knew about her, which wasn’t much. She smokes, she’s elderly. She’s not friendly. I worked late nights and was home most of the day, and I never once saw Evelyn with another person. I almost warned the EMTs about her abrupt manner and ability to make you feel like you’ve accomplished nothing in life, but maybe that was more my problem than Evelyn’s personality. She was 80-ish and living alone with birds. I was early 20s, living alone with a cat.

The EMTs rolled in a gurney and left open the apartment door when they were working with her. The acoustics in the hallway were like a gymnasium, so I could hear everything. They were sweet-talking her to get more information. Evelyn sounded weak and scared. 

They carried her down the first flight of stairs, talking to her the whole way, reassuring her, making small talk. Evelyn said almost nothing. I was still standing in my doorway as the EMTs rolled her past me and prepared to carry her down another flight.

Evelyn looked at me, although it still felt like she was looking through me. “Thanks,” she said.

I watched her float down the rest of the steps and out the door, like a sick, elderly queen. That was the last time I saw Evelyn. I don’t think she died. My guess is what family she had moved her into assisted living. I also don’t know what happened to her birds.

Despite my very brief and unfriendly encounters with her, I was so glad to have been there to help. To my knowledge, she didn’t even have a phone. For all intents and purposes, Evelyn’s emergency contact was some guy a third her age in the apartment directly beneath hers, who doesn’t smoke and recently complained about her feeding pigeons.

To end this on a positive note, sometime after my final encounter with Evelyn, I was walking past the church next door and happened upon an injured pigeon in the grass. I don’t know if I was being targeted by these birds, or what. But there I was, standing and holding a pigeon that was about to die. I knew there were wildlife rescue places in town, but I wasn’t sure if I could get it there in time.

Another person walked up. It was the attractive woman who regularly parked illegally in the parking lot next to my apartment building. To this point, our relationship was one of waves and ‘hellos,’ and me promising not to turn her in for leaving her car where she shouldn’t.

She showed immediate concern for the bird, while I had forgotten about it and just stared at her. The pigeon died. I placed it in a shoebox, buried it, made a date with that woman, and set myself on a course to never again live alone.

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