Hearing and Listening

"It was a raccoon," my neighbor said with certainty.

I tried again to tell her the facts of what I knew, "But....."

"No buts.  It was a raccoon, and I am sure of it."  And then she began to detail her experiences with raccoons.

I nodded politely and agreed that no doubt she knew best because I was taught (and quite correctly, too) to respect my elders.  But, you know what?  She didn't know.  She didn't know, and she surely didn't know best because she hadn't heard all the facts.  

We're all like that sometimes, aren't we?  We theorize ahead of the information and we shoot from the hip believing that we know best.  What we should be doing is listening and not merely believing that we've heard it all.  I am as guilty of that as anyone else.  It's a lazy habit, and I believe that it's a result of the way we receive pre-digested news bites and potted previews of information.  We learn little or nothing and wrongly suppose that we have heard it all.

It's good to reflect on that so I can try to improve myself.  But the fact of the matter is that it doesn't address the mystery that I was trying to discuss with my neighbor.  I assure you that the answer is Not "raccoon."

I first noticed the signs of the mystery last week when I was looking outside my bedroom window at my bottle tree.  I've mentioned my bottle trees (a Mississippi tradition that I love) here  before several times, most notably when someone marauded one of my bottle trees and stole antique bottles from it.  (You can read about that in this post.)  This time, a bright blue antique bottle lay at the base of the tree.

I refuse to believe that a raccoon is the culprit.  Why?  The most notable reason is that a different bottle had been substituted for another one that was missing.  It's clear glass when all my bottles were color.  It's a bottle I've not seen before.  I have no idea where it came from.  And that is just creepy.  

A raccoon seems highly unlikely to bother to (or to be able to) reach four feet up to slip a bottle down onto a 4-inch long twig to say thank you for the bottle it has stolen.

The bottle tree that is at the bedroom side of my house is not easily visible from the driveway and it is obscured by shrubs and the like.  You have to know it is there before you notice it.  

I should also say that my driveway is about 600 feet long and there is a heavy treeline that obscures my house and most of my yard from the road.   And you pretty much have to know that there's a house here before you notice it as well.  My two-acre property is a quiet and secluded place.  I am very alone here.  That's why the next thing that happened startled me enough to try to talk to the neighbor.

My half-grown kittens Frank and Dolly are unaccustomed to seeing any person but me.  If someone else comes by, they dash away to hide silently.   They only do this when they see a human being.  That's why I knew what had scared them in the middle of the night when they were sitting on the sill of the window that looks out onto the bottle tree.  There was a sudden thump as they jumped down and then complete silence.  They never leave me in the middle of the night like that.  There had to be someone outside.

I kept as quiet as the cats were doing, and I didn't want to look out the window to betray my presence.  I listened, and heard nothing.  But it occurred to me that I didn't even hear the night birds and the frogs that are usually quite noisy here.  All was silent.  

Since then I've noticed a couple of things shifted around in my yard--like the big plastic chairs that are in front of my workshop.  They have been moved a few feet away from where they have been for some years.  And this happened several days after the strange bottle turned up on my tree.  Someone has been here.

There's no concrete proof that I can offer that anyone else would understand.  No one notices the little details here but me because almost no one is ever here but me.   During this past month, I've seen only three people.....and now I'm trying to figure out one mystery.

I'm watching carefully.  I'm listening cautiously.  But I wish I had been heard when I was trying to tell my tale.  And I hope that my mystery visitor never returns.

Life is good.
Be vigilant, and stay safe.