Strange, but Written Down

Every Wednesday a man comes by and leaves a hammer on my front porch. The hammer is always placed so that the handle faces due south, as if the tool is actually the needle of a compass. And it could well be, if it were possible. If hammers could float on porches, which they can only when the concrete is still wet.

Every Thursday the birds sing in unison, in a sequential order determined by the starting pitch of their song. This drives my daughter crazy, since she sleeps till noon on Thursdays, birds willing. In the end, the birds win since there are too many of them to count, let alone boss around, and birds do not take orders from humans.

A duck's quack only echoes in Wyoming on Friday. No one knows why.

I met a woman once whose sole purpose in life was finding a red house with green shutters in a small town with both a Main street and a Church street. She hadn't gone very far to look, mainly because she didn't have a car, but every Saturday she would leave her house at noon and walk the streets to see if she couldn't find that house. And as fate would have it, she couldn't. She successfully couldn't find that house every time she looked. One might imagine that her life is actually complete, unless she manages to find her way to another town.

There's a place in northern Ohio where blue cars are prohibited. No one knows why.

If you turn a cat counter-clockwise three times in succession... actually, I don't know the rest of this one.

Speaking of cats, though, our orange tabby is trying to tell us something. She has, for years, been bringing us various objects. At first, her favorite was a red hat that she would fetch from the closet and deposit, with loud fanfare, wherever we happened to be. Over the years the red hat fell from favor, but she still find something at least once every day, and sometimes as many as two or three times. For many weeks it was a white bunny head (the kind that vibrates when you pull a string), but now it's two green frogs that my wife keeps on the bed.

That's not the unusual part. This morning, after placing a black-and-purple vampire head in the hall (it laughs maniacally when disturbed), she flanked it with the two frogs, one with its head facing the vampire, and one with its head facing away. Her creation resembled a V, and it can't have been a random creation. She is obviously trying desperately to communicate something, and we have no idea what it is. We can only hope that it has nothing to do with an imminent threat.