Ding, Ding, Ding…Kah-dunk

Have you ever had sounds you don’t realize you appreciate until they’re not there anymore?   The general hum of your house air-conditioner blower running…until it breaks down.   There is a sound our refrigerator makes I never really noticed until the power was down for a day over the winter.    Then there are other sounds you come to rely on—this post is about one of those sounds.

We have an alarm system in the house which has the “external door chime” feature turned on.   This means whenever anyone comes in via a door from the outside, we hear three quick dings.   It’s helpful because you can be anywhere in the house and know someone has just gone in or out one of the doors, even if you’re on the second floor and the door in question was in the basement mechanical room.

If the only one home was my husband, this might mean he’s headed off to work.   If we were expecting my parents to arrive, it probably means they’ve come to the front door and have come on in.   It’s just three beeps, but it tells a lot of information.   We had to turn the chime feature off for a week at one point while a faulty sensor was replaced and I felt lost, not knowing if people were coming in our out of the house.

Now that we have children, there is another sound I listen for, especially in this hot weather.   I hear the, “ding, ding, ding” and then I listen for a, “kah-dunk” that means the child or children have shut the door behind them.  Lack of this sound could mean air-conditioned air hemorrhaging out the door for what could be hours if no one was near that particular door.

Only this afternoon my daughter and her friend decided to tie a single blanket around their waists so they would be connected.   They navigated down two flights of stairs carefully into the basement to go outside—because when you’re connected together the logical thing to do is go swinging.   I heard the ding, ding, ding but no subsequent kah-dunk.   Sure enough, the door was wide open when I looked down.  

My children are great about closing the door, as are all the neighbors’ children because we constantly remind them, but there are the exceptions.   In this case, they couldn’t figure out how to turn around together.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Lucy The Dog Update:   As I was putting the children to bed my son asked me when we were going to bury Lucy’s ashes.   We’ve decided we need to mark the spot with a larger  bush or sapling so the yard crew won’t cut it down during the “semi-annual backyard natural area beat back”.  Tomorrow we’re going to go to one of the garden stores and see what we can find.