Oh Solo Mio

In the middle of the night…. I suddenly heard some strange singing.

Hoping it wasn’t angels and I wasn’t about to embark on a new journey, I woke up completely and imagined the worst. My mind does that. Imagines the absolute worst.

The singing was coming from my backyard, which is enclosed, but just barely. Texans are famous for not fencing their yards in. My aunt Madge used to say, “Fences are to keep people out. We want people to come in.” And I loved that philosophy. However, I wasn’t raised that way… so I still try to keep people out.

We live on a corner and there is direct access to our yard from the street. There’s a creek behind us and a lake in front of us… and because we are on a corner, there’s only one neighbor next to us. Not a lot of land, in fact, it’s a regular ol’ neighborhood… but we just happen to have a yard that anyone could walk right into. Not that anyone ever has.

Until now.

We don’t keep the gates locked, either… because why? The fence is low (waist high) so if we locked the gate, heck, you could just jump right over.

Well, I couldn’t. I’m old. But other people could.

As the singing continued… in a sort of monotone voice… I became frightened. It sounded like a 13 year old boy who’s voice had not quite matured yet. How I knew this, I’ll never know. Maybe I was scared of 13 year old boys when I was that age.

Suddenly the singing got closer. No longer did I think there was a young boy playing in the creek or walking along side of it during the wee hours of the night (and did his mother know where he was?) but now I knew that he was actually in our backyard and approaching the house. I began praying that I'd locked all the doors.

The singing was suddenly right under my window. And Rick just snored right through it.

I began to imagine all kinds of things. Was he going to set our house on fire? (I’ve seen too many movies.) Was he going to break down the door and come right in? Was he going to steal our BBQ? (That’s all that is in our backyard at the moment.)

As I laid there trembling, the singing began to sound less like singing. Suddenly it was more of a bark. Suddenly it was a quack. Maybe I’m the quack.

Yes, the duck that was passing through our yard made it’s way from the lake to the creek with no trouble at all.