Ah, Spring. Not too long ago it was that we moved into our house under the veil of Winter, and I slowly trained my paranoid brain to succumb to sleep despite the many creakings of the settling abode. Not that, of course, an apartment complex does not incur the same creaking and settling; but in an apartment, where from time to time the sound of Hindi pop music or the Mormons next door arguing drifts across one’s consciousness, one can never entertain the pleasant suspicion that one is, in fact, alone. Not so in a house, where the presence of an unaccounted person is a matter for alarm and the preparation of bludgeoning weapons; and therefore it was with great difficulty that I reined in my active imagination in those first few months in the house, and kept it from painting bogeymen and burglars at every ominous sound.

This task done, the Spring arrives, the friendly white noise of the rain subsides, the morning sun creeps into the sleeping hours, and plagues the house with cacaphonous thermal expansion. The squirrels get frisky and express it with freefall jumps onto the roof above my head; the occasional raccoon takes it into his head to make sinister scrabbling and digitigrade noises across my deck or shingles. I lie in bed, re-training my mind to ignore the multitude of sounds it insists are a matter of life and death. Minutes tick by, creaks fade into ominous footfalls, a branch scratches a window somewhere, a hollow thump sounds from the deck. Perhaps I’d sleep better with a scimitar by the bed.