Don't sing to me.

My family has issues with wildlife.

Don't get me wrong - we love a good walk around a zoo, and highly recommend the National Zoo to everyone who comes to visit. But we love our sleep too, and many times the wildlife interferes with that. Just last week it was warm and spring-y so we got to sleep with our windows open for the first time in months. Abbie got up in the morning looking a little bleary-eyed, so I asked how she slept. She answered, "That BIRD is SO STINKIN' LOUD." Surely, we have some birds here who don't know to use their inside voices until everyone is up. And that reminded me of when we really lived in the country.

After Ben retired from the Navy, we bought six acres in the middle of nowhere, TN. It's hard to tell people where it is, because it's not near anything. We built a house and settled in.

Then we met the neighbors.

We learned to run over copperheads in the road at night. Our neighbor, Jason, shot the rattlesnake I walked within three feet of. Brown Turantulas liked to go for evening walks about the same time we did. (Can you see why we don't live there anymore?) The frogs sang to us at night. One night there was a frog on the side of the house just outside the girls' window. Deb got so sick of the noise, she marched outside in the pitch-black, peeled that thing off the siding, and threw it as hard as she could over the cliff in the front. This from the girl who wouldn't touch a worm growing up. *Edited to add: I talked to Deb this afternoon and reminded her of this story. She laughed and then said, "You know, it was so fulfilling, and I felt SO good knowing I was going to break every bone in that frog's body." She's her daddy's girl.*

Then came the whipporwills. When we first heard them we were thrilled, having never heard one before. Then we tried to sleep. And they Never. Shut. Up. We turned on a fan in the bedroom to mask the noise. No luck. Finally, Ben got out of bed and may have gotten a rather large-caliber assault weapon, walked out the front door, and shot in the direction of the whipporwill's lovely song. Ahhh, blessed silence.

The whipporwills did try to come back a few times, but all Ben had to do was open the front door and say, "Don't MAKE me come out there. . ." and they would find a different place to sing for the night.

Be thankful ~

Karen