All right, this time it wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t the trespasser, I was the trespassee.

I was sitting at the computer minding my own business last night when I heard a lot of panicky fluttering of wings upstairs.

Oh goody. There’s a bird in the stove again.

We’ve got a reproduction pot-bellied stove in the upstairs parlor. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time to the previous owners — whose exquisite taste I usually find faultless — but I would’ve argued the point if I could’ve. I’ve never lit the thing and don’t intend to, since it seems like just asking for trouble to superheat an inefficient iron contraption at the dead-center of an 110-year-old wooden house. But from time to time, critters just have to come wandering into that interesting brick tree on my roof, and if they’re particularly intrepid, they’ll eventually wind up inside the ashy stove. It’s difficult but not impossible to get back out the way they came, and after rapping on the stove last night and getting dead silence for minutes, I figured that’s what had happened.

But nope. This morning when I was padding about with eyes half-closed, my prisoner woke up and freaked out again. So I got to catch a bird in a lace curtain this morning, and after capturing his likeness for posterity, I let him go.

He was a Chimney Swift, so you’d have thought he would’ve been happier about the whole thing. Or at least given me a decent picture, for goodness sake.

And mind you, if this was a fairy tale, he would’ve stopped to thank me for saving his life and tell me that if I ever needed any favor I should call out his name three times. Or at least given me a coupon to Chuck E. Cheese or something.

But no. Blip and he was gone.

Yep, I just love springtime.