I’ve learned several things this past week. Perhaps the most important is that when I hear strange noises that I cannot identify in our house, I should alert others to them.
No, I am not talking about ghosts or other paranormal things that can be easily and inexpensively dealt with. We had a leak. And not in the roof where all that would have been required to fix it are a few shingles, nails, and someone to climb up there to apply them. Oh, no. Nothing simple or easy like roof leaks or ghosts for us (although I will tell you ghost stories related to this house without too little prompting). Our leak was in the pipes.
Let me back up a little. I am usually the last person awake in our household. The nighttime hours are my time. Last Tuesday, after I got home from aikido, I was taking a nocturnal prowl through the dark-quiet house when I heard… something. Now, since alerting others to this noise, I’ve been asked several times to describe it, and that’s just the thing. It caught my attention mostly because I did not recognize what it was.
It sounded a bit like static. A bit like water. And a bit like the wind. But it wasn’t exactly any of those things. After checking every likely source and a few unlikely sources, I finally decided that, somehow, it had to be the wind. Forget the fact it didn’t sound like the wind had ever sounded in all the years I’d lived in this house. That was the only reasonable conclusion I could think of. Well, there was one other, but… no, it had to be the wind. Just hitting something unusual and producing the unaccustomed noise.
The next night, and I can’t remember exactly when, whether I was on the phone or after the phone call with my friend, or when, but I heard it again. Briefly. I found it odd. Most especially because there was no wind that night, but I was busy and moved on fairly quickly.
Thursday, I left at 7:30 in the morning and didn’t get home until around 10:00 at night. And when I was home, I didn’t spend any time in the part of the house where the sound had been localized. I just moved through.
It’s also important to note, between falling asleep and waking up, I would forget about the noise until I next heard it.
Fridays are my days. I can set the alarm and get an early start on the day’s tasks, or take the opportunity to sleep in. I don’t have to be anywhere I don’t choose to be that day. I often spend it in sweats while I slave away at the keyboard attempting to be brilliant, or at the very least, lucid. This Friday, I chose to sleep in a little. It had been a stressful week and, after a long day and a good workout on Thursday, not setting the alarm seemed like a good thing indeed.
When I did wake, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table across from my mother-housemate, leafing through a seed catalog while she ate a salad and read the paper. As I contemplated different types of blueberries and considered whether or not I wanted to try growing them this year, that noise intruded on my consciousness again.
I looked up at the female parental and said, “I keep hearing a noise.” I also turned off the kitchen television so we might both better hear it. I had no doubt that once it was pointed out and distractions eliminated — it was a sort of background noise easily dismissed or covered by other sounds — she would hear it, too.
Nope. No such luck.
That was the first time I was asked how to describe it. How best to describe a sound that no one else can hear and that you can’t identify? It was almost enough to convince me I was imagining things. Except, I knew I wasn’t. But I definitely seemed to be hearing things that no one else could. Typically, that’s a very bad thing.
Fortunately, my mother trusts me. Despite the fact that she often tells me there’s a fine line between brilliance and insanity, while looking at me as if she’s wondering if I’ve crossed that line, she does believe me when I tell her I’m hearing a noise that no one else can. And, eventually, she was able to hear it too. And, despite the fact that she would rather I have been imagining the whole thing, that was a good thing. Because she had heard it before and knew what it was.
There was a leak. In the pipes. In the house.
Fortunately, the pipe was accessible through the crawl space. No freshly painted walls had to be damaged in the repair process. Fortunately, the pipe that was leaking only fed an outside faucet. Fortunately, despite my 2 1/2 day delay alerting anyone to the fact I was hearing something odd, the plumber indicated that it had not been leaking that long and while wood was wet, none had rotted.
Oh, and the reason it sounded partially like static? The pipe wasn’t dripping or running, it was spraying water upward toward the base of the wall/kitchen floor where I kept hearing the sound.
Still, lesson learned: The next time I hear something in the middle of the night that I can’t identify, drag my mother out of bed and make her listen, too.
Huh… Maybe I should wake up her up the next time I hear a knocking noise at three in the morning when there’s absolutely no one at the door?
- ‘Giant’ disturbs slumber in Nova Scotia (ontario-wind-resistance.org)
- Say What? (kathyvancil.wordpress.com)
