Assumptions

For several months now, a splattered cream and brown splotchy dribble sat in the middle of our kitchen window. Every time I looked out at our trees and herb garden, right in the center, marring all the beauty, was an ugly blobby drip of who knows what, a chew spit? Bird poop? I did wonder who would spit on the window, since we don’t know anyone who chews. Birds, however, do poop, wherever they are, so because we do feed birds, we imagined poop it was. 

The weather during this time was mostly rainy, windy, stormy as befits the Oregon coast. I kept hoping the weather would wash away the schmear because I didn’t want to go find a brush, then go out in such crappy weather and scrub it away. After every weather event I kept hoping the offender would be gone, but nope, there it was, one tough piece of icky.

Finally, after a week of sun, I found the window brush, hosed it down, and went to erase the splat. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but it remained as it had been. Then I got suspicious. I reached my hand up to see just how hard this thing was and discovered what I had assumed was wrong. The glob of guck was not on the outside of the window at all. 

That could only mean, then, that it had been inside the window, sitting there within reach for cleaning for months. No one had tried attacking it from the inside of the window, not me, not my husband, not the housekeeper. How it got there or what it was is anyone’s guess. A hummingbird had flown in an open front door one careless day, and we’d swept it out after an hour of maneuvers with the kitchen broom. Birds in the house happen and it annoys me, but what really rankles is that the poop could have been scrubbed away a long time ago except for everyone’s assumption. I went inside, got a wet and soapy rag, and wiped the grainy blot out of existence, an eyesore no more. 

I laughed at myself and took this experience to heart as a lesson: we make the wrong choices sometimes based on false assumptions. Things are not always the way they look. We can’t always make judgments based on appearance. From now on I’ll be thinking of this incident and asking myself, is the bird poop really on the outside or do I need to check things out more thoroughly?