Losing the battle with Nature

Last summer I set up a little herb box out my kitchen window. When the herbs died back in the winter, I didn't do a thing, figuring that I would just replace them in the spring. Well, lo and behold, they survive the winter and start looking all sprightly and green. Thoughts of parsleyed rice pilaf, chive omelettes, chives in vinaigrette start to float through my mind...I noticed that the chives tended to lean a little forward for some reason, but I figured they were just reaching for the sun.

Then, two days ago my new DH told me, "There's a bird sitting in your 'huh-herbs'," as he likes to call them. No wonder they were flat!! So I promptly stick little toothpicks throughout the box, thinking, "Take that, Bird! Now you try and sit your little ass in my grass!" This morning I looked out the window though, and there she was, bold as brass, cooing in my parsley. I shoo her away, and the little miss doesn't deign to fly away until I start lifting up the screen! She flies about 10 feet away to rest on a telephone wire and I grumblingly stick more toothpicks into my box. I should've known it was a futile gesture by the way she watched me so unconcernedly. In fact, now that I think about the way she was perched on the telephone wire, she looked rather....constipated. This afternoon my DH came home, looked out the window and said, "Your bird dropped an egg in the box."

And there it is. As are the felled toothpicks in the foreground.

My first, overwhelming urge was to pick the egg out of the box. But then I realized that I didn't have the heart to try to do something with the egg once I'd picked it up...throw it out our second floor window? Lay it on the brick ledge where the mother would knock it over as soon as she tried to move it? Turn it into a mini omelet with my new chives, as my evil aunt suggested? All would be bad karma. My DH called over his shoulder, "Face it, you lost the battle when the toothpicks didn't work," and he's right. Oh well, I can concede defeat gracefully when I must.

Now I have a buh-bird box instead of an huh-herb box.