Bye Bye Birdie

Bye Bye Birdie
When we returned from Nicaragua, I called Birdie’s owners as soon as I had access to a phone. They had been caring for her while we were gone. Bad news, I was told. You can’t have her back. Birdie had become so confused her first couple of days back with them that she got lost in the forest. They think she was looking for us and our house. Sometime the next day, a local farmer found her wandering around and managed to return her to her owners. But, the incident had disturbed and frightened them enough to suggest that maybe their “experiment” to have someone else take care of her for awhile had failed. While they acknowledged that Birdie seemed very happy living with us, they suggested it might be better for her to remain with them. Going back and forth from one house to another seemed too stressful for her, and part of our original agreement included our leaving her again during our April break.
It is really strange coming home and not seeing Birdie. We really miss her, but we are resigned at this point, and will see if we can visit her. She lives a 75-minute walk from our house, so I can’t imagine we will see her very often.

Bedtime
I may have mentioned before that we find ourselves going to bed really early down here. The sun goes down right around 6:00, there is no TV to watch, no internet connection at the house, and we are just more tired, maybe from the altitude, the rain, the wind, and the walking up and down hills. Nevertheless, I was pretty surprised tonight after dinner when both Kaz and Kamila said they were completely exhausted and needed to go straight to bed. Kamila had been yawning all through dinner and her eyes said, “We need sleep.” Kaz could not even muster the energy to take a badly needed shower, and instead went straight to bed. Kamila left for her room down the hill, and I was a little worried she wouldn’t make it without collapsing on her way down. I looked at the clock just after she left. It was 6:45.

Bye Bye Kamila
Upon our return to Monteverde, Kamila stayed with us one more night and then moved out. She couldn’t stand the bugs in our house. We tried spraying her room with really toxic bug repellant, tried to convince her that it wasn’t that bad (there only seem to be bugs around when she is home), tried to explain to her that there are bugs everywhere in this town, and tried to convince her the bugs would not bother her. Nothing worked, and she is now settled in a room at a kind of hostel at the bottom of our hill. A lot of her stuff is still here, though, and we still get together every day, but she just couldn’t sleep here anymore.