I Have A Bird Disease

I’m not sure what to call this, I know it’s not the “Circle of Life”, but it’s some kind of circle.

I usually drive into my garage each time I come home, but today I decided to park outside.  I was laden down with Wal-Mart bags and as I walked into the garage I saw a gigantic earthworm.  Had I done my normal routine I would have driven my van right over it and never even been aware of squishing the shit out of it.  Literally.

I dropped the groceries on the table and went back out to rescue the worm.  I walked up, bent over, reached for the worm and my hand stopped two inches above it.  I tried and tried to make myself pick it up, but I couldn’t.  I started doing a little dance around the garage giving myself a good pep talk, reminding myself that when I was a kid I used to pick up worms all the time.  I used to dig around in my Grandpa’s worm garden.  It was awesome.  Now it was definitely not awesome.  I did want to save the little guy so I went and got a plastic bag and picked it up and dropped it in the flowerbed.  Good deed for the day – done.

This got me thinking about all the things I used to be willing to touch when I was a kid and all the things that my mom and other grown ups would touch that I thought was disgusting.

Thus begins the circle….

The girls have brought me worms, ants, two handfuls of fur off a dead rabbit, a dead bird, spiders, and ladybugs (Ladybugs look so sweet and innocent, but they are not.  Their colorfulness makes them look like the clowns of the bugs and everyone knows you shouldn’t trust a clown.  Hello?  IT.  Stupid Stephen King.  He ruined clowns for everyone.).  Kids play in mud and crawl through bushes.  They wear other kids’ hats, Lord help me. 

I used to do all of these things, but something happened and I can no longer make myself touch nature. 

But I can touch things that they can’t or won’t.  I pick up vomit with my bare hands and scrub it off the floor without gloves.  I have reached into a toilet and pulled out the biggest, thickest, firmest piece of poop that was clogging it (wearing a bag over my hand).  I will use my hand to clean food off plates and scrape out of the sink and into the garbage disposal (This one really sends my kids for a loop and I used to gag when my mom would do it.)  I will pick a booger out of a kid’s nose.  I will flush a public toilet that has “icky” in it.  I will actually clean a toilet.  I will fold Thomas’ underwear.  There is nothing wrong with his underwear.  There are no skid marks.  The idea that it is dad’s underwear and it touches his butt just about kills them.  Girls, one day you’ll be changing his diapers.  I clean up cat puke.  I will clean up any bodily fluid.  I will clean up food in any condition, although I do have a problem with the skin from raw turkeys and whole chickens. 

Trust me, when I am finished picking up all of this nastiness, I sanitize the hell out of my hands.  Regardless, I can pick it up.  I could not pick up that worm.

One thing I do not like to do is wash bird poop off of my car.  It always seems to get on the windshield.  I am guilty of using the wiper fluid and wipers to try and wash it off.  When it’s fresh and it smears across the window I start dry heaving.

Which reminds me of a story….

One day the girls and I were at a park.  I was sitting on the bench gabbing with some lady.  I was wearing my sunglasses.  The next thing I knew I was slapped right in the eye.  This was a one in a billion, trillion chance, but a bird flew over me and dropped its’ load.  It landed in my eye.  My eye was open.  It went through the little gap between my sunglasses and my face and landed smack in my open eye.  How does that happen?  It’s impossible, and, yet, it happened.  Emily will confirm this event because I think some of it splattered on her.

That’s right.  Straight to Google I went.  I just knew that it was terribly dangerous to have bird poop in your eye.  I most definitely would contract some sort of disease.  I found a website called “Bird Diseases from A-Z”.  There were 40 of them.  Yes, I counted.  They had horrible names:  Gastric Yeast Infection in Birds (They probably get this from taking antibiotics.  They should have eaten some yogurt.); Gastrointestinal Parasites Tapeworms (Fantastic.  I just know I would look in a mirror and see a worm wiggling across my eyeball.); and the dreaded Pacheco's disease, which is caused by the herpes virus, usually contracted from the FECES and nasal discharges of infected birds.  FECES!!!!  I don’t have an STD, but I get bird herpes.  Seriously?  Bird herpes?  The majority of birds die within a few days of contracting it.  I knew I was screwed.  Screwed. 

“Here lies Krista Vance.  Killed by bird poop.  RIP.”

In the grand scheme of things, when it’s your time to go, death from bird poop is high on the list of interesting ways to go, and we all know I live an interesting life.  It’s only appropriate that the end should be just as interesting.