Summer Tales, Volume Two

There are so many summer stories that make me smile. This one makes my cousin Ariel and I blush and laugh.

My cousins and I always slept in the green room when we visited our grandparent's. It was formerly our aunts' room (including my mom). It has three beds in it, I always slept in the "big" bed. We called it the big bed because it was taller than the others, at the time I usually had to climb up from the other trundle-ish bed or take a running leap to get into it (much like my bed junior year of college that was lofted so high that it was occasionally comical to watch me try to get into it, especially if I was tired)

My cousin Ariel and I both woke up around the same time one night even thought we'd all been in bed, sound asleep, for some time. We weren't sure why we had woken up, but started whispering for a few minutes. We were talking when we heard a thud, followed by some other strange sounds. We thought there was a burglar in the house. We had a brief, whispered conversation about what we should do before hiding under the covers and pretending that we were asleep. That lasted all of maybe two minutes, during which I think we heard another strange noise. We decided we couldn't just lay there. We crept out of bed and cautiously opened the bedroom door. We peeked out into the long hallway towards the living room. Once we were sure we didn't see anyone, we flew down the hall to our grandparent's room. We woke up my grandpa and told him what we'd heard, then climbed into bed with our Grama while he went to check it out. He came back a few minutes later to confirm that everything was fine. We weren't convinced until he pointed out that their dog, Doogie Bowser, hadn't made a peep, and surely he would have barked if there were anything wrong. He then suggested that what we'd heard was merely the air conditioner. We accepted this explanation (though we probably secretly thought we'd heard something...this may have be the summer of "there's something fishy going on") and went back to bed. Naturally, it took us a while to fall back to sleep. Before we fell asleep we heard a similar noise...this time we realized that it was clearly the air conditioner, trying to rob the house of the summer heat.