View from the North 40: Like a blessing or a cursing

Like a wine expert, a chocolate connoisseur, an opera singer with perfect pitch, a movie sound director, an artist, a sniper, a braille speed-reader, a plush-pile inspector who runs his or her hands over soft, fuzzy fabric and says “Oh, yeah, that’s so soft and fuzzy” (it’s a job, I'm sure), like any of these people, I have a sensory gift.

I hear things.

If it buzzes, whirs, taps, hums, squeaks, rings, dings, grinds, taps, knocks, clicks, whistles, snaps, twangs, thumps, hisses, swishes, rattles, cracks, wheezes, whizzes or whines, I hear it.

Admittedly, I’m not so keen with voices. But irritating noises? Those are my thing.

I’ve lost a lot of sleep over the years because of those noises. The furnace hums (the cover doesn't rattle anymore because I stuffed a little padding next to the loose spot). The water heater won’t, for crying out loud, shut off. That clock in the living room that had to go because it kept time too loudly (it's a real thing).

A mouse at the other end of the house clinks, clanks and rattles dog kibbles around in the metal food dish so loudly I have to wake the cat up to send her on the hunt, and she’s like “Wha—, huh? Oh, I’ll let the trap get it.”

Snap! And then the cat thumps and clanks up the hallway to the bedroom — trap with dead mouse in tow. Not even the dog hears any of this, but me? I have to get up in the middle of the night to dispose of a rodent carcass and reset the trap.

The horses had to be fenced away from the cottonwood tree because one of them took a shine to scraping his teeth down the hard bark until, thunk, his giant incisors clunked together … and he started over … at 3 a.m. It was like trying to sleep with someone eating a fresh carrot at my ear.

How many nights did I get up in the middle of the night to chase horses away from the water trough because one of them liked to bong, bong, bong her hooves against it like a giant kettle drum.

My husband John would rave in exasperation, “You got up at 4 in the morning to do what? Just ignore them. The trough is 50 yards away from the bedroom!” — which is a total exaggeration, because it's only 45 yards away, so, like, virtually right under the window.

For a few months, recently, I’d been telling John I could hear water running back by the toilet and the conversations went something like:

“Did you see where the water’s dripping.”

“There’s no dripping. It’s in the pipes.”

“Water is running through the pipes? That’s so unusual.”

“It’s not running. It’s, like, humming.”

“Humming?”

“Yes, a high-pitched metallic hum — like almost whining, but humming — and no water is turned on — anywhere.”

“Hmm, well, I’ll keep an eye on our little metallica, and you let me know if its tune changes,” said the guy with better than 20/20 vision to the chick with better than silent-dog-whistle-level hearing.

I had several weeks of checking water sources, which weren’t running, and the pressurized cistern, which ran at odd times — and putting up with blatant skepticism from someone who has to see things to believe them — before it became obvious that the valve in the toilet’s water tank was leaking.

I felt vindicated when the water gurgled away in there and filled the septic system to over-flowing, and maybe I felt just a wee-bit avenged when someone’s phone fell into the flushing toilet and went to its final resting place in the sewer.

Last night, when the house was still — the traffic momentarily quiet, the trains between runs and John and the dog at that post-settled/pre-snoring stage — I heard a noise. Beyond the whirring hum of the fancy little fluorescent light bulb, I heard a faint hint of metallic hum from the water pipe.

I looked. Nothing visual. I hiked up to the shop in the dark to check the pressure tank. More nothing. I returned home to find the pipe had silenced, too.

They are plotting something.

I looked at my tired face in the mirror and realized that one day I will be that tormented doddering woman in the nursing home who tests for total deafness in the normal range, but runs around with an oil can greasing all the door hinges, walkers and wheelchairs, “Squeaky, squeaky, stop the squeaky. Wha—?! Where's my wrench? Someone is rattling.”

(Put an earplug in it already, would ya, at [email protected].)