The aroma of self-sufficiency stood staunch, close to the customer-picked stacks of fir and redwood lumber. Then on to the tool section, where anyone can buy his way (on sale) into the domain of do-it-yourselfers. Then toward the automated checkouts with the planks I was going to buy, but I forgot something else. I heard something that didn’t fit the warehouse setting, but paid it no heed.
    The hardware superstore is an interesting setting for a view of cosmic irony. Human intentions have a way of inadvertently, or at least silently, staking claims that they swear will never be penetrated. There is always the war between nature and nurture. There is always the ivy-covered building, down the street from a brand new department store with its polished glass doors, and if they’re not careful both of the buildings will look the same in twenty years or so. Usually things like that take a long time. It’s not like drug stores suddenly get overrun by stray dogs or warrior crows. But sometimes–
    As I stood in line to check out, I noticed what the foreign sound was. I usually heard it in quiet neighborhoods and in the park, but here it was: sparrows in the rafters–many of them. And come to think about it, they were pretty loud. I don’t know how I didn’t notice it earlier. They were calling each other, and it was clear that they had made this hardware superstore their home.
    The roll-up doors for large loads in and out served as an easy entrance for the birds. There were too many of them to have gotten in by accident, when the automatic doors happened to be open.
    The line was slow going. I stared at the birds, thinking of what I would write about them. Then two of them started to fight, and the decision had been made. There, up above me, was another civilization. Up in the painted, brilliant white metal beams and air conditioning ducts was a world of air-dwellers, unaware of the commerce below them and unconcerned about the racket they were making. They didn’t care; the two feisty ones pecked at the other’s head.
    I’ll pretend there were two other people in the whole building who noticed the birds. One was the manager and another was an old woman, in for her replacement daisies, replacing the ones that the neighbor’s dog shredded in pursuit of its tennis ball.
    The manager is upset because of the mess he knows the birds are making somewhere, and that they’ve been inside the store for four days now, and there’s no easy way to get them out. I have a closing time, and they’re not going to know that, he mutters to himself. I can’t shoot them. That would just cause too much trouble. I can’t do anything but, confound it, I have a store to maintain! I can’t have a bunch of messy birds enjoying themselves at my expense!
    The old woman (I’ll call her Gladys, because I think that was a popular name back in the 1940s) hears the birds and remembers raising that blackbird with the broken leg from its mother’s negligence until it was ready to fly away by itself. She sees again how birds have no sluggish movements whatsoever–everything is urgent and sudden with birds, and she chuckles. There’s always a fire somewhere, if you’re that small and fragile–can’t let the big guy get ya!
    Neither of them is going to get the birds out without a huge effort, and Gladys is going to be out of the store in twenty minutes anyhow. The manager is going to put up with it, but grumble throughout the day. Gladys and I will go home and tell a loved one, “I saw sparrows in the roof of the hardware store today.” The manager might go home and say the same thing, but maybe with a few swear words in there somewhere.
    The manager will war against nature with no plausible means to win, because, darn it, he’s no hippie and he’s got a store to keep up so customers keep on coming back. No customer wants to have nasty birds pooping on their products.
    Of course, Mister Manager, but consider that some of us could be cheered up by the critters and can always reach for the garden hose without the bird droppings on it. I’m no hippie either. I can’t speak for Gladys–maybe she is a hippie. But at least we’re not fighting a war with no profit. We’d rather join the stubbly ranks of an army of amputees in jogging clothes fighting a band of crazed steamroller operators than join a campaign against nature.
    The birds are going to come in; there’s no getting around it. The ivy is going to creep, and the wasps are going to chip away the wood. The gophers will destroy the foundations and the perfect lawns, and the bluejays will make you wash your car every week (unless you learn your lesson and stop parking under the power lines!). And, yes, woodpeckers actually do make those holes in the telephone poles.
    How about instead of getting peeved at something that has no emotional capacity to return the gesture–how about we enjoy creation? I surely did as I walked out of the store thinking about how tigers respect no surround sound systems, how you’ll never convince a cat to play Nintendo, how the birds make a mess out of the storefront signs with their nests, and how dogs never understand most of what you yell at them when you find out they’ve spent the night on the brand new sofa. What’s the use?
    I have roleplayed enough with the manager and Gladys, and poof! They disappear, leaving only me walking back to the van, rolling the noisy cart with at least two wheels that only spin around and around instead of helping balance the thing. And I noticed that the wood that I loaded into the back of the van was indeed a reminder that it goes both ways: we invade nature, and nature invades our worlds built out of its worlds. It all works out, and it’s plenty fertilizer for a nice crop of smiles and sighs.