By Bill King
It was almost bedtime. Jean had headed back to our bedroom. I was in the kitchen getting coffee ready for the next Monday. We have this wonderful machine that we call the coffee maker. It’s probably like the one you have, but it is a marvelous contraption. It allows us to add the extremely complicated combination of water and coffee grounds, press a preprogrammed timer, and have coffee waiting when we get up the next morning. I know you are thinking there is nothing complicated about that recipe, but I’ve tasted enough coffee that tasted like motor oil mixed with turpentine to cause me to differ with you!
I hear Jean call out from the other room, “Do you hear that?” I replied, “I hear you, but I don’t hear that, whatever that is.” I listened intently to my coffee machine, but it was silent. I listened for any unusual sound as I walked back toward Jean, but I didn’t hear anything. Then Jean said, “There it is.” I didn’t know where it was, what it was, or what she was talking about. I didn’t hear anything. Then she said walk on back this way, so I walked deeper into the bedroom expecting something to jump out and get me and quite possibly eat me alive…bones and all! Then I heard it. It was faint. It was brief. It was a high-pitched sound like that of a bird chirping. Since we don’t keep birds inside the house, we figured it must be right outside our window.
Before I headed outside to see if I could locate this night caller, visions of booger bears, creepy crawlers, and catch-a-bodies quickly took a jog through my brain. I grabbed my cell phone so I could see what might be about to eat me…right before it ate me. My phone has that handy-dandy flashlight app. When I walked out on the back porch, all I heard was the local choir of crickets and frogs. I asked them to hush for a minute so I could hear our mysterious tweeter. They complied much like I used to when my mother asked me to please turn down my electric guitar. I came back in, proud to still be alive and not eaten, and told Jean I couldn’t hear it out there.
By this time, she had done what you do when you don’t know what to do…Googled it. She even found an audio recording that sounded exactly like our soloist in the night. It was a hawk. It had to be a night hawk. But, to be sure, Jean decided to check the bird’s nest on the front porch. Maybe a baby bird had fallen from the nest and was in distress. That wasn’t it, but that was a good rhyme I just made. You should always check the smoke alarms for strange sounds. I recently replaced all our alarms with new ones, so I thought that couldn’t be it, and it wasn’t.
Finally, I tracked the sound down to the back side of the house and specifically to the master bathroom. Surely something was hiding behind the commode! I’ve read those urban myths about snakes coming up through the sewer and into your commode. I slowly drew closer while humming “I’ll Fly Away” just in case it was a snake in the potty. Thankfully, it wasn’t.
Tomorrow morning, I’m going to Home Depot to buy a brand-new flush valve for our master-bathroom commode. Do you know those things can make a whistling sound exactly like a red-tail night hawk? Often, there is a simple explanation for those frightening things in life.
