When you go to bed, it’s nice just getting into bed and starting the whole relaxation-routine thing.  You know the———deep, full breaths & the counting of sheep (don’t ever count goats, they will haunt your dreams).  That rarely happens here in the swamp.  Just a couple of nights ago my daughter heard cries out in the barn.  Try as hard as I could, I just couldn’t hear them……….that’s a worry in itself……………damn those headphones & rock bands.  We grabbed flashlights and head-lamps and headed out.  Half way there I realized that I was barefoot in calf-high weeds.  Eeeeeeewwwwwww.  Not a healthy over-sight.

We got out to the barn, and everything turned out to be fine.  It turned out that a baby goat got separated from his mom and was hollering.  This in itself is not a good idea.  Drawing attention to the fact that you are alone, young, and raucous in the dark………..never clever.

While my daughter wrangled the yelling buckling back to his mom, I’m standing on the other side of the paddock fence feeling useless but encouraging my daughter & goat by my presence with a flickering, dimming headlamp, in my barefeet, in wet/high weeds, sure I am hearing slithering noises coming towards my toes…………………..That’s when I hear a really loud, close hissing noise from above.  Double Eeeeeeeewwwwwww!  My AAA batteries are giving out, I’m seriously considering becoming incontinent, afraid to move, afraid to stay.  The hissing continues and my imagination is doing back-flips.  I’m just shy of being that stupid actress with big hair, in a bad horror movie who starts running & tripping & waving her hands uselessly over her head into the drooling mouth of the arachni-shark.

So my eldest comes up beside me, with her extremely bright Mag-Lite, follows my shaking, baggy arm pointing to the noise with the beam of her flashlight to where the hissing was still coming from.

It turned out to be a very disturbed Screech Owl.  Really loud, really incensed and really, really tiny.  I felt so foolish…………I silently, morosely followed my daughter in her sensible boots through her wake of weeds back to the house, feeling even more foolish.  Somewhere in the past few years our roles as mother and daughter have been swapped.  I am proud to say I did not become thoroughly incontinent.

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In the summer, after dark even the windows of the house have noise-making, live-things stuck to them.  You can’t go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without involuntarily witnessing the source of some bubbling, croaking, chirping noise stuck to the window by where you are sitting with only their bellies exposed to you while they are carrying on with their nighttime serenade.  I have watched the personal-bits of so many genre of frogs and toads and lizards, and moths, and bugs completely unaware that they are affixed to transparent (yet frosted) glass and that I am studying so much of their nether anatomy………………….cover up!

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I’m not usually the hysterical type.  Although this posting is neither really illustrating nor reinforcing  that stellar aspect of my overall personality.  But I tell you one thing that really got to me a year ago, at this time of year.  This year I am watching and waiting for them.

These black, hard, tiny, split-pea-sized beetles.  Somehow they get into the house at this time of year.  My husband told me he saw them crawling out of the sink drains and over-flow openings of the bathtub…………..I can’t un-see that vision now.  It visits my dreams.  No wonder I’m an insomniac!  Well last year I had the lamp on by my bed innocently doing a crossword puzzle (I cheat), when they came……..drawn by the light………………..

There were so many of them.  They were on the ceiling, in the bed, crawling down the wall, in my hair, in my pajamas, in my ears, between my toes, in my nose…………………It happened so fast!  I did run down the hallway in a less than grown-up way I am sad to say again.  There might have been some screaming involved.  But you have to understand.  It was like a wave of these dark, impenetrably-hard beetles that took my bedroom by storm.  There were waves, I say!  There were waves!!!  They swarmed and when they hit you they pinched you.  They were everywhere.  Double Eeeeeeeeewwwwwwwww!  I slept in the den.  In the dark.  Very quietly.  They didn’t follow me.  There may have been some bourbon involved after that.

The next day I found them on my bed table, on my pillow, in my shoes.    They were on Patrice!  Poor Patrice.  I had abandoned her in my sprint for safety, I hadn’t even stopped to consider her helplessly hanging there on the door…………..she got an early laundering after that.

I don’t even know what type of bugs these beetle-things are.  But I’m watching for them…………………….I’m watching.