Early awake

I got up at 4:30 this morning, after having dreamt all night about fleas and woken up itching. Hmph.

The next thing I did was stand in the kitchen with one finger on my lower lip, and one hand on my hip, and contemplate, blueberry waffles: yea or nay?

And just then... There was a loud crash on the back porch!

Now let me tell you about the back porch, when it's in the dark. It's scary. It has always seemed to me that at some point in my residence here on Fig Street, I will come upon either a) a homicidal maniac in a drug-induced coma on my glider, or b) the recently expired body of said maniac slumped on the steps. It's a shadowy, tucked away place - the back porch. It harbors deep forebodings in the night.

So as you can imagine, the crash alarmed me. I turned around slowly, with a grimace, and in the light from the kitchen shining through the screen door, I could see zero hulking lurking things. Good! But kinda bad, because now I had to approach the door to flick on the porch light. Throwing caution to the wind, I did just that. I turned on the light, looked out the door, and... relief! No men on the glider, bleeding!

In fact, nothing at all, except one fluffy little raccoon cub the size of a cantaloupe, scampering round the end of the glider and down the steps.

Doom turned to glee, just like that. I made like a raccoon cub and scampered down the inside stairs to alert the baker to These Exciting Happenings. Outside we could hear little skitterings, and then we saw six tiny eyes glinting way up high in the dark bulk of the hemlock tree. When our eyes adjusted, there were three raccoons, clambering over one another and dangling from branches. They considered us briefly, and just when the horizon split open a little bit of blue light, I think they realized how sleepy they were, because they all three scritched their way down the hemlock trunk, and off they went through the garden. One paused to peer in the bakery window, which starts a few inches above ground, at raccoon's eye view.

Matt said he knew I wouldn't be grumpy once all day long, on account of the raccoons, and well, he was right. I wasn't. The end.