A bird in the house is a death in the family.

There were no birds in the house I grew up in. By this I don't just mean live birds, but also images of birds. No partridge in a pear tree; no landscapes with pheasants in the background; no wallpaper with ducks on a pond. As far as I know it originated with my grandmother. Grammy would say, "A bird in the house is a death in the family." Once my parents ordered a sofa. The swatch of upholstery fabric they saw in the story didn't have a bird on it, but, when the sofa was delivered, there was a bird on the edge of the pattern. My parents sent the sofa back. My family was serious about their superstitions.

My parents bought the house I grew up in when my father got back from the war. The front porch wrapped around the side of the house. Every spring my dad would put up floor to ceiling screens that created a screened in porch. Every fall he would take them down. As soon as I was old enough to help, it was one of my favorite chores to help him with. Once the screens were up, there were three doors between the street and the house – the screen door we had just put up, the normal screen door, and the front door.

In the 44 years my parents lived in that house, a real bird made it through those three doors only once.

As usual we got the screens up from the cellar the first Saturday after my birthday. This ritual was a harbinger of spring. I had moved into my first post-college apartment in January, but still came home to help out with the bigger chores. I had no way of knowing it would be the last time I would help put those big screens up. Two weeks after we put the screens up, my father had a massive, fatal heart attack.

It rained the entire week leading up to my father's funeral, but the day of the funeral the sun finally came out. As was our custom, all the extended family and good friends came back to the house after the cemetery. As one of the last guests was arriving, a bird flew into the house. My sisters, my mother, and I went into a panic. After all those years, Grammy (by then more than a decade gone) was right, "A bird in the house is a death in the family."