sandrakwilliams.net

One day my little friend Sydney caught a bird and left its bleeding carcass at the back steps. (She loves me, oh yes she does.) It lay there for several hours before I found it, and by that time the blood had soaked into the concrete.

I washed the spot with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner, and still the bloodstain remains. You can see how the cleaner killed the lichen and bleached the area immediately around the stain.

(The lichen is a welcome guest, by the way, and grows on the vertical sides of the steps and in broad patches on the patio itself. It will eventually eat through the concrete, but I enjoy watching it change through the seasons. The lichen gets a little furrier during the winter, flakier in the summer.)

Why on earth did I file this under Writing? Research, of course. You never know when you might need to know what a pool of blood — and that bird had an amazing amount of blood for a critter so small — does to concrete.

This picture of Sydney is about three years old. She’s a little less rambunctious now that she’s passed the mature age of 10, and she disappears somewhere in the backyard to sleep most of the day. As soon as I go outside she turns up, though, meowling pathetically the whole length of the yard — 150 feet — until she reaches me and is properly rewarded.