The Feather Incident

My son, Zach, is hands-down my quirkiest child.  The laundry list of his diagnoses isn't as important as the fact that almost every person, young and old, in the small town we lived in knew and loved Zach.  The teachers, the students, the parents, (the cops), the store clerks, everyone.  He is a kind, generous, occasionally violent child with the kind of curiosity that would allow a person with a normal IQ to excel in any engineering college.  Zach's unique genius drives him to wild investigations that often end in a mess with us laughing because, really, what else can you do?

    

It was one of those Saturday mornings where I had planned to do laundry, clean the house, run errands and feed the kids.  The kind of glamorous day every young girl dreams of.  I was still in my nightshirt and most of the kids were eating breakfast in front of the TV when feathers started floating down the open stairwell from the second floor.  There weren't many feathers, but when you don't own birds any feather will draw your attention.

    

I was at the kind of fork in the road I often found myself as a mother.  Do I ignore it and it will go away without much damage?  Or does it warrant immediate attention?  It's a judgement call.  Like deciding whether the cut your kid just got needs stitches.  Looking back, I made the right choice.  I decided to head upstairs and I didn't need to ask who was up there, I knew.  Zach. If you are asking how I knew, you've never met him.

    

With every step, the quantity of feathers increased exponentially.  As I turned the corner and saw his room, I wasn't angry, I wasn't laughing, I was in utter disbelief.  It was like looking at an optical illusion.  You know you couldn't be seeing what your eyes thought you were seeing.  What used to be his room had been transformed by the entire contents of two large feather pillows into an ocean of white fluff...that was still moving.   Zach was standing in the middle of it all with feathers stuck in his curls sporting a frightened look sprinkled with a dash of accomplishment. 

    

I'm not entirely sure what I said, but I'm fairly sure I quietly asked Zach to go downstairs.  I'm not being sarcastic; I was probably very calm.  My normal reaction to most things is quick, loud and passionate.  However, in moments of extreme duress I am calm in an ominous way.  During labor with the only child I birthed, I wasn't the violent, cursing woman I and everyone who knew me predicted I would be.  I was calm, quiet and polite.  Ryan and my mom thought I had been possessed.

    

Left on my own in the room, I found that every single surface had been covered.  Every dirty sock on the floor, his sheets, his desk, everything.  So, I devised a plan to find all the clothing, shake off the feathers and put them in a basket in the hall.  If you are smarter than I am, you will realize the flaw in my thinking.  Every time I picked up a shirt, every feather in the vicinity began to float.  The only ones that didn't continue to drift slowly back down to the floor were the ones that stuck on my sweaty arms, legs and face.

    

After a few attempts to pick up the clothes, I changed my tactic.  I needed to remove the bulk of the feathers before moving anything else.  Perfect. I went downstairs to get the vacuum and all of my kids were silently sitting down watching TV.  They only do that when I have blown a gasket and gone on a tirade.  Apparently, my zen-like calm had left me at some point when I was upstairs because my oldest told me later that a stream of obscenities had been flowing down the stairs.  The fact that I stood in front of them looking like a deranged bird in a nightshirt further convinced them to remaining perfectly still and silent.

    

I hauled the vacuum upstairs and started it up.  My lack of experience with feather removal showed again as I failed to anticipate that vacuums actually blow air out as they suck air in.  Within three seconds, the entire room was airborne. It was about this time that I became aware I was getting a bit wheezy.  Damned asthma.  So, I thought, "I'll just open the window to get rid of some of this goose dander."  Do I need to paint the picture for you?

    

Fast forward an hour and a half and the entire room was free of feathers with the help of a dust buster.  All hail Black & Decker.  I never asked Zach why and I never punished him.  I figured the hours he sat silently on the couch listening to my muffled curses was punishment enough.  Sometimes with kids the anticipation of discipline is penance enough.  I threw away every feather pillow in the house after that.  So, years later when I would occasionally find a stray feather, I knew it was from "The Feather Incident", as it came to be known.  Let this be a lesson.  As they say, if you can't be a good example at least be a dire warning.