The birds have been in lockdown for over a month now.
Contained. Accounted for. Not on anyone’s porch. Not standing in the driveway like they pay rent.
I made a mental list of everything that’s better with them locked up.
No sidewalks to power wash. No wondering where four semi-feral dinosaurs wandered off to. I can park in my own driveway without checking for a peacock who has decided the hood of my car is a personal stage. No Amazon drivers barreling down the drive toward birds who believe they have right-of-way. No foxes. No hawks. No frantic headcount at sunset.
It’s safer. It’s simpler. It’s objectively easier.
It’s miserable.
The Quiet Is the Problem
I didn’t expect to take it this hard.
I’d gotten used to the chaos without noticing it had become the texture of my day. The random appearances. The screaming. Han doing something structurally questionable on the roof. Morpheus materializing at the back door like a haunting with opinions.
That was my enrichment.
Now I walk outside, and it’s just… quiet. Orderly. The driveway is empty. The sidewalks are clean. Nothing is perched anywhere it shouldn’t be.
This is what I wanted, apparently.
The birds aren’t handling it much better. I’ve become convinced that all peacocks are ADHD. They need something to investigate. Something to destroy. Somewhere to be that they’re not supposed to be. Take that away and you get four birds staring at the walls of a greenhouse like inmates who’ve exhausted the prison library.
We had a more enriched life when everything was a risk.
Noted.
Never Ask an Engineer to Hang a Curtain
The permanent run is coming. That’s the jailbreak plan.
James and I spent last weekend squaring and leveling the base frame. I use “we” loosely. James squared. James leveled. I held things.
He did not get out the digital calipers to measure the exact distance the bubble sat from center on the level.
I was genuinely surprised.
This is a man who, if you ask him to hang a curtain, will discover three hours later that your wall is crooked. Not that the curtain is crooked. That the wall is crooked. And now that’s a problem.
That actually happened, by the way.
I love details. I do. But the base of a peacock run needs to be under the run. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to exist, so four birds and one woman can stop losing their minds.
He showed remarkable restraint.
I Don’t Know If It’s Right, But It’s a Plan
The weather, meanwhile, had its own plan.
During the downtime, I did what any reasonable person would do: I recruited AI to help me build something I have no business building.
I don’t know anything about construction. It has the internet at its disposal. Between the two of us, we produced a thirty-page plan for building the run and breezeway from the ground up — explaining techniques and terms along the way, like a beginner’s guide written for someone whose primary qualification is “has birds and a deadline.”
I have no idea if it’s right.
As I told James: “It knows more than I do, so I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt.”
He did not argue. Which is either confidence in the plan or acceptance that this is happening regardless.
The Part Where the Rain Stopped and Backup Arrived
We got a break in the weather that happened to coincide with my daughter-in-law and granddaughters being available to help.
Non-engineer help. I cannot overstate how refreshing that was.
We got the base finished — the foundation the run will sit on top of. Progress you could stand on. The youngest spent most of the afternoon socializing with the peacocks through the greenhouse, feeding them grass and peppermint, which is one of their favorite treats.
The birds were thrilled. A new person. New attention. Snacks.
For about two hours, nobody seemed jailed.
Then the rain came back.
Of course it did.
If you need me, I’ll be staring out the window with four peacocks, all of us watching the weather radar, and googling “how to explain to a bird that the construction delay is not a personal attack.”