The doorbell rings, late on a Saturday night. “Are you expecting anyone?”, the Husband asks. I don’t, but he’s just got back home and is tired, so I feel I’m more prepared to meet whatever is out there. (Not that I usually expect bad things but we’ve just had some unsettling news and I irrationally expect the unexpected visitor to be connected to that.)
“I hope it’s ok that I’ve come into your garden,” a woman says, “but I’m looking for your doghouse.” “I have a cathouse,” I say, still unsure why that would be any of this stranger’s business. (We bought the house years ago, when Charlie first started showing up in our garden and I wanted her to have some shelter. It’s still on our porch, ready for whatever other critter needs a place to sleep.)
“A Russian guy who speaks no German put a pigeon with a broken leg in there,” the woman explains. This raises more questions than it answers but it eventually transpires that said Russian found the pigeon, wanted to help and, and — despite his lack of German — somehow managed to find an online group of people who care for injured birds in their spare time. They gave him an address where he could drop the bird off. Since it was late and the woman who runs the place has three small children, he was told not to ring the doorbell, just to put the pigeon in a box she keeps outside for that purpose.
So far so good, except that, instead of driving to the street address in a small town in the state of Brandenburg he had been given, he went to the same street address in Berlin. Having been told not to ring the doorbell, he then presumably wandered around our garden, spotted the cathouse and assumed it to be the box he had been told about.
Eventually, the mistake was discovered. Another member of the bird group — a woman from Saxony-Anhalt (yet another German state, do keep up) — happened to be visiting friends in Berlin. When she realized she was near the wrong drop-off point, she volunteered to go looking for the misplaced pigeon, which is how she ended up in our garden.
I hope they will be able to nurse pigeon back to health but either way, this story gave me hope. There are many bad things happening in the world, but there are also three people — a random Russian (who even offered to come back and fix his mistake, despite being over an hour’s drive away at that point), the woman in Brandenburg, who somehow manages to take care of injured wildlife while raising three small children, and the woman from Saxony-Anhalt, who cut her visit with friends short in order to find and help the unfortunate bird — who all went out of their way to help a fellow creature in need.
The next time I despair of the state of the world, I’ll think of them and people like them. They are out there, too.
Walking the cat 