The lights are off, the alarm’s set, the house is quiet.
Click, click, click.
I open my eyes. There’s a sound in the room.
Click, click, click.
It’s the overhead ceiling fan. We haven’t used the ceiling fan in weeks since the weather’s been cold outside. This was the first night we turned the fan on and, there it was, the noise.
Click, click, click.
Normally I can tune out noise. This talent – that’s what I call it – started when I was a young girl. There were seven children in our house, and we were a loud family.
Because there were so many of us, we had to talk loudly to be heard. I’ll be honest – there was lots of yelling from a couple of us because we needed to be heard.
If we weren’t yelling, laughing or playing, the television was on. I think the TV played almost non-stop when we were growing up. That’s how I learned to tune out unwanted noise – either concentrate on the people around me or the television.
When I first went to college, I lived in a dorm. There was always noise because there was one central bath area.
Somebody was usually yelling up and down the hall for another towel, to see if somebody was in their room or there was music playing.
In order to study and finish homework, I learned to tune out all that commotion.
When I moved to a house, the first thing I did when I came home from work was turn on the television. It didn’t matter what was playing – the noise was familiar and kept me company.
Then my first child came along. “Sesame Street” was usually playing in the background no matter what we were doing. This is before parents learned about the dangers of overstimulation.
Instead of mentally overwhelming him, Nick learned to tune out what he didn’t want to hear. Later in his childhood, that ability translated into tuning out my voice when I asked him to take out the garbage or put his clothes away.
That tuning out ability went right down the line to his brother. Every school morning, I’d yell upstairs “Are you up yet?” Every. Single. Day.
When Nick called from college early one morning, I was in the midst of yelling the daily nagging refrain.
“Oh no,” Nick groaned. “It’s the voice from my nightmares.”
Apparently he’d tuned out my voice but the trauma remained.
But when it comes to noises in the house, my hearing is selective. I can ignore loud music and singing coming from our granddaughter’s karaoke machine, but I jump right up whenever the dryer dings that the clothes are finished.
I can hear a cricket in the next room in the middle of the night and ignore somebody tapping on the desk in an office.
The cricket requires immediate removal, no matter how long I have to search that bedroom. The office tapper could bang out the chorus to “Wipe Out” and I wouldn’t blink an eye.
If my car makes an odd noise, I turn the radio up. If the grandchildren are over and they’re loud, I smile and let the chaos run its course.
These days won’t last forever, and a noisy house is a small price to pay for having them with us.
My husband believes the motor might be going out in the ceiling fan. As that’ll be an expensive fix, I think I’ll put that ceiling fan noise in the category of “let’s tune this out.”
That’s a noise my checkbook and I can live with.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.