Here’s another post from my friend, Michele. I’ll add our take on feeding birds afterward.
My grandmother, of blessed memory, lived for most of the years I knew her in the two-family house where my mother and her brothers grew up. The Friedman family had the second floor, with living room windows that looked out over the roof of the porch and then to the street. Every morning my grandmother would wet some bread in water, open a living room window, and put the wet bread out on the roof for the birds. As far as I knew and as far as I remember, she’d been feeding the birds this way for as long as she’d lived in this house: 40 or 50 years by that point, I imagine.
When I was a kid, my mother used to leave the uneaten bits of our sandwiches (PB&J crusts, anyone?) and other odd bits of leftover bread out on the kitchen counter to get stale. Then she’d add them to already frozen plastic bread loaf bags with prior stale bread. When we went to the zoo, we would take these bags of “ooz food” with us to feed the animals. Eventually, the zoo outlawed the practice of feeding the animals, although I have no memory of what my mother did with leftover crusts.
We keep a bird feeder outside the dining room’s plate glass window, generally filled with mixed birdseed and sunflower seeds. Dubbed the “TweetStreet Diner,” the feeder provides hours of entertainment for our cats (especially Prospero, the smallest and the best hunter). TweetStreet customers entertain us as well: I keep the Birds of New York Field Guide (second edition) nearby and we’ve learned to identify a number of regular and occasional customers.
Recently, I had an aging loaf of bread in the drawer, so I set it out to grow stale before it could mold. A few days later, I broke the bread pieces and spread them below the birdfeeder. Squirrels and birds had a feast, and that simple act of tossing the stale bread brought old, good memories—of my grandmother Sarah and my mother’s ooz food—flooding back.
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