I live alone.
So when I walked into The Merlin Room in my Laneway Theatre (the ground floor of my home) and discovered a single grape sitting on the rug in the centre of the room… I was quite puzzled.
It wasn’t there last night and nobody else had been in the house.
And why a grape?
You can imagine the scene as I walked in, slowly bent down and picked up the grape and looked around. There was nowhere this grape could have come from and nobody in the house but me.
I circled the room. I turned the lights off. I closed the door.
I did not eat the grape.
A few days later, with nobody else having visited and me going into the theatre for the first time since the grape incident, I opened the door to the Merlin Room and sure enough… there was another grape sitting on the rug in the centre of the room.
I did have grapes in the house. I keep them in the fridge upstairs and feed them to my rainbow lorikeets, but they haven’t been downstairs so there’s no way they could be responsible…. or so I thought.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Later that day I was watching my birds, Sparks and Bandit, playing upstairs on the balcony. There’s a particular area they really love to hang around in near the big pot plant.
It was then I caught them going behind wooden supporting beam and looking down the hole in the floor behind it!
This is the same beam as in The Merlin Room directly below it.
I headed downstairs to see just how far the hole went and, sure enough, it goes all the way from the balcony to the Merlin Room right behind the supporting beam.
I moved the lounge chairs away from the wall and there was all the evidence I needed… a small pile of grapes.
Those sneaky birds had been taking the grapes from their cage in the centre of the balcony, carrying them across to the pot plant, and intentionally dropping them down the hole behind the wooden beam!
Once there was a big enough pile at the bottom of the beam, future grapes would hit the pile and roll all the way onto the rug in the centre of the Merlin Room.
Mystery solved!
How could I be mad at my ingenious little friends?
They got extra grapes today – but I sat with them and made sure they ate every single one.
