“Oh, come on!” Sugar water was dripping through my fingers and into the sink. “How hard can this be!”
My son Alex came into the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”
I was struggling to fill the new hummingbird feeder I’d just gotten. My reading glasses were slipping off my nose as I used my forearm to push them back on so I didn’t have to use my sugar drenched hands. I looked over at the directions that were on the counter top.
“Okay, it said that a small bulge on the plastic and a notch on the metal cap need to align.” I held the base up close to my face to check. “I did that.” I looked over at Alex. “That took me a good fifteen minutes to find those.” I shook my head. “I should have gotten a magnifying glass they were so small!”
I looked back at the directions. “Then it says to pour the nectar in slowly.” So, I took the pot with the cooled nectar in it and began pouring it into the bottle. I looked back at the directions. “Then firmly but slowly screw the bottle into the base.”
I looked over at Alex. “Then it says to turn it upside down quickly. It literally says to do this in less then a second to avoid leaking!” I turned it upside down and watched as the nectar began dripping out.
“I give up!” I cried.
I looked over at Alex. “This is the third pot of nectar I’ve heated up, let cool down and tried to fill this thing!”
I put the hummingbird feeder into the sink and began rinsing my nectar sticky hands off. “I can’t believe I needed to read the directions to fill it but after the first try was a disaster I fished the directions out of the garbage and tried again.” I sighed. “And again!”
I turned the water off and reached over to get some paper towels. “Clearly I’m doing something wrong.” I shook my head.
Alex reached into the sink, took out the hummingbird feeder and began looking it over. After a few seconds he stopped turning it. “There’s a crack in the bottle.”
“What?” I looked over at the feeder. “Where?”
Alex pointed to a faint line in the red beveled glass. “Right here.” He began turning the bottle again, stopped and pointed again. “Here’s another one right here.”
I was squinting to see. “Oh, for the love of…” I began shaking my head. “I tried three times to fill that thing and it’s been cracked all this time?”
Alex shrugged his shoulders as he put the feeder back in the sink. “Well, I’m glad I could help.”
I balled up the directions and threw them in the trash. “Well now I’m glad it has some cracks in it because I was beginning to think I didn’t know how to fill a bottle with liquid!”
Alex smiled as he patted me on the shoulder. “You can call me anytime.”
Slice of Life 