“She was in the room with the bird as it flew out of the fireplace”
I’m in the process of selling the home that my late wife and I bought when we moved to Lexington, Kentucky. So, the — one consistent issue that the home has had is certain parts of the roof and siding and gutters have not always been the most impervious to intrusion. So, repeatedly, we have had birds get into two different parts of the home. Most consistently, they’ve gone into the attic, originally through the eaves and then more recently through some of the side of the gutters. But, what happened more often — or the problem that arised earlier which I’m actually kind of grateful for, was for a little while, in 2021, 2022, birds were getting in through the chimney of the house which then — which had a cap, but there was a large space at the top of the chimney between the opening and the cap, large enough that birds could pretty easily fall in. And then the trick was they couldn’t really get out.
So we first discovered this when we came back from visiting family over Christmas 2021, 2022. We got into the house and found that a bunch of things were knocked down. There was bird poop everywhere, unfortunately, and there was a dead bird. So basically, over the next few months, I dragged my feet and I did not, did not take the necessary steps to getting the chimney properly screened in to prevent birds from getting into it. So sometime in Spring of 2022, I was working on campus in the writing center, which is how I got funding that first year and I — Jaci, my late wife, tried to call me and of course I couldn’t receive the call because I was in the basement. So I only found out about it after the fact.
But she called and left a voicemail because another bird had dropped into the chimney. And so the voicemail was actually — she took it while the bird — while she was in the room with the bird as it flew out of the fireplace, knocked a lattice off our window, the lattice came crashing down, partially cracked. The panic in her voice was pretty obvious, but also a note of sort of manic humor, and she basically told me what was going on and asked if I could come home, or asked — and then basically said she didn’t really know what to do, which was fair. I think she ended up using a broom to kind of usher it outside. But all that to say, despite the fact that that was a massive pain and it’s a fair bit of money to keep them out of the chimney and now to keep them out of the attic, at the same time. If I hadn’t — if there hadn’t been the birds situation, I wouldn’t have had that voicemail, and since she passed in 2022, it’s actually one of the very few voicemails I have from her after we got married.
