I’m sorry. That song lyric will always have horror connotations for me. I guess that’s just suburban programming, but what good could possibly come upon a midnight clear?

Anyway. Last night our alarm woke us up again a few minutes before midnight. Our digital phone has gone out again and so the alarm can’t phone home. It conveniently phones home every night at midnight. Then it beeps loudly that something has gone wrong. It’s fantastic. I’ve found I can turn it off, by jumping out of bed and resetting the alarm.

So last night I was on my way to do my nightly reset when I noticed a figure at the window. At first I thought it was Punky, our cat, looking out. But it was on the wrong side of the window. Then I thought it was perhaps one of the 2,004 cats that live in our neighborhood and like to stare in our windows. But it was the wrong shape.

As I got close it shuffled off. It was a juvenile possum. Not quite as long as an adult. It shambled away looking embarrassed that I had caught it peeping in.

I mentioned it to Julie when I got back from resetting the alarm. “There’s a possum in the house?!,” she yelped. I calmly explained that it was outside the house. It was just looking in the windows. “I would have screamed bloody murder if I had seen that,” she replied. I mentioned that I thought its shambling was kind of cute. She turned over, convinced of my insanity.