Light or Noise?

 

I get up early MWF to take my dear wife to dialysis, and I go out to warm up the car about 4:45 am.  Yikes!  I try to be considerate of the neighbors … although they are not that considerate of me.  Next door to me are two white Pyrenees that bark constantly.  When their owner leaves them out all night (so she can get a good night’s sleep) I have to keep a noisy box fan running in my bedroom to drown out their barking.  But, back to the story of my consideration (and my modesty.  Ha, ha!).  Friday morning, I didn’t turn on the back porch light so that the neighbors could continue to sleep.  And I negotiated the ramp and car door in the dark pushing my wife in her wheelchair (she wasn’t too confident with me pushing her around in the dark).  But as I was loading her wheelchair into the back of our car, a tickle in my throat started a coughing spell.  The two white Pyrenees responded with barking, which triggered the neighbor’s collie up the hill, which alerted the other neighbor’s pit bull two houses over.  My good intentions had failed.  As I got into the car with the dog chorus all around, I asked my wife, “Which is worse?  The light or the noise?”  We decided that it was the noise.  So, Monday, I’ll turn on the light and let my neighbors and their dogs ease into our morning movements.  Hey, no good deed goes unpunished.  Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “… there is no new thing under the sun.”  People get up early and dogs bark.  The neighbors just need to deal with it.