Noisy Arrival

One of the things I really, really miss about Wakulla is the relatively quiet nights. Crickets and frogs ruled the dark hours, with the very occasional gunshot or coyote yip or rumbling truck motor as it tossed up dust driving down our road.

When we moved to town, next to the college boys, nights were no longer peaceful. They were punctuated by booming, drunken voices, girly screams, raucous laughter.

After buying our house and installing the new windows, nights became somewhat quiet again. Sure, there's that garage band that insists on practicing starting at midnight, but they haven't done that for a while so perhaps the cops were called one time too many. They were the next street over, so it wasn't that bad (for us). And of course the high school football field two blocks the other way - but that's only a factor during football season.

The last few nights have been quite pleasant and we love sleeping with fresh air wafting through the open windows. The air feels light and clean after all the rain yesterday washed the pollen out of it. We had to grab the chance while we could - before the pollen begins to stir as the world moves it around.

Today was the first day of spring. It arrived at 1:20 am last night. We were alerted to its arrival by the sudden carrying on of owls. At 1:21, every owl in a two mile radius seemed to go off. We have your garden variety barn owls hooting to beat the band, and the tiny screech owls that sound like a million cats being stepped on at the same time. Do they KNOW that spring has arrived? Because the way they went off was just like an alarm clock - only you can't find the snooze button. They did that for about an hour before subsiding. Of course, at that point, Darling Man was wide awake and couldn't go back to sleep. He got up and went to work.

Me? It didn't bother me a bit. I surfaced just long enough to mentally go "huh", realize what was going on, and sink back down into unconciousness.

Owls are the kind of nightlife noise I can handle.