Friday morning I took the dogs out and while they were doing their thing, I noticed something weird. My house is on a brick foundation, and there's a front porch in front, up 6 or 7 steps. The brick goes up to make the walls of the porch, and there's a cement cap on top of the wall. And what caught my attention was a cement block sitting on the cement cap on the east side of the porch, right by one of the double living room windows. Then I noticed a snow shovel on the floor under the windows.
The snow shovel has stood leaning against a tree for a couple of years now--one of the handymen left it and I never bothered to move it--and the cement block stands on one side of the porch steps; with a 2nd block, it used to hold a plastic lattice panel across the opening so that Stella and I could sit out on the porch without her having to be on a tie-out.
The dogs hadn't made any noise that night, but they sleep in the back of the house with me, and there were two fans going, one in the living room and one in the bedroom, so it would be surprising if they'd heard anything.
Well, it worried me, so since then I've been leaving the front porch light on all night, and have moved the cell phone into the bedroom, and have been letting the dogs have the run of the house at night.
So tonight one of the girls from the laundromat across the alley came over during her break while I was outside with the dogs and asked if anything funny had happened Thursday night. I looked at her funny and told her about the shovel and cement block, and she told me that someone had broken in a window of the laundromat van, found keys (I didn't ask why someone had left keys in the van), and tried all the back doors of the building (there are a couple of other businesses in the building as well as the laundromat), then had taken a pipe from in back of the building and gone down the block, where he'd smashed in a truck's window and started it (I didn't ask about those keys, either...) and driven it into a fence. When the owner came out to investigate the guy had thrown a pipe at him. Apparently someone called the police, who arrived in time to arrest him. He was, she says, "messed up on drugs."
So there was someone on my front porch that night. Why he didn't break the living room window, and why he didn't damage my van, I don't know, but I'm deeply, deeply grateful he went off somewhere else!
And I think I may keep leaving the front porch light on for a while...
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1 comment:
Glad nothing happened, and you are O.K.
We have the porch light on at all times, in fact I can't turn it off, even if I wanted too. I also leave the light on in our hall, and when I'm alone in the house, I leave it on in all the rooms, looking out front. Makes me feel safer, especially since someone broke into my son's car twice. Now we only have two cars, and they are in the garage. Stupid people, stupid drugs.
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