3:00 am musings

I’m up at almost 3:00am.  Normally at this time, I’m doing what most of us are doing, however, I’ve got two (only two??) problems.  I’m coughing, and, the neighbors are up.  The neighbors are up rather noisily although it sounds as though they are getting ready to call it a night.  

It’s been warm, but I’m not turning the air conditioner on in April, sorry.  It was 96 here on Thursday.  I think yesterday it was only 89.  But I’m NOT turning on the AC.  The windows are open for breeze, and besides letting in a little air, they let in the sounds of beer bottles clinking into a paper bag as they are being picked up, slurred voices, and people who shouldn’t be walking across the street getting into cars and driving away.  The party over, I hear sirens in the distance heralding a life changing moment for someone.  

I’m a simple person of the soil (SPOTS), who lives in the middle of a large Midwestern city.  I have a 50 foot by 75 foot plot of land with a house sitting on it, and neighbors all around.  It’s noisy and it smells funny when the wind blows just right -the meat packing and rendering houses from the north and the sewer plant on the south remind me I’m really close to, well, close to “things”.  My dad summed it up once while visiting my house soon after I bought it, “You can’t even pee in your backyard without anyone seeing you.”  (He was really a SPOTS.  For many years he lived on the edge of a small town on a couple of acres-just enough to say you owned some land, but not enough to say you have to “farm” it.)  And for him, you have enough land between you and the guy who lives next to you if you can have enough privacy to pee outside if you want to (although you don’t just stand out in your field and do it, you find a tree or stand in an outbuilding with a dirt floor, you always do these things with decency and decorum, you weren’t born in a BARN for heaven’s sake…)

The coughing has subsided somewhat, my head is clearing, and the neighbors have called it a night at least outside, so I’m thinking about going back to bed.  Come on breeze.  It’s muggy and warm.  If I were a SPOTS truly in a SPOTS’s home, I’d go sit on the porch in my nighclothes in the dark.  Can’t do that here, the porch is lit like a beacon.  If I turned the light off, I’d get robbed.  I get robbed anyway, but…did I tell you that someone came over the fence into my yard and helped themselves to a 20 foot aluminum extension ladder we had back there leaned up against the back of our house?  It was a nice one.  It held my rather portly self quite nicely as I painted trim on the house, or hung Christmas lights up.  Oh well.  Time to call it a night.