Wasps decided to chase me off the front porch the other night after I watered my flowers, but I put up a good fight with the water hose. The water chased them away, and I noticed they’d built two houses and a condo on brick next to the porch light.

Even at full blast the water didn’t phase the mud-like houses, but the spiral condo suffered some hurricane damage when I switched the hose to jet speed.

An old porch broom didn’t bring down the concrete-like mud houses, but I was able to scrape some of it off with the other end of the broom.

When I noticed spider webs at the top of the storm door I sprayed them off with the hose before I started on the glass door. Once I turned off the water I heard music.

Calliope music.

There wasn’t an ice cream, or food truck, down the block that I could see, but the music got louder and sounded like an organ was winding down in slow motion.

Maybe it was a TV commercial because I’d left the front door open.

The music was louder in the house.

It wasn’t the TV.

Then I realized it was the doorbell chimes, and I almost slid down the hallway to turn them off.

That aging mechanism on the wall was too high for me to see which buttons did what, so I tried all of them. That caused distorted and deafening Oh say can you s-e-e-e b-y-y-y, and other slow-mo music when I moved the set of A through Z slider knobs up and down.

“What will the neighbors think?” was my first thought until the noise finally stopped, and I knew I’d triggered the doorbell’s innards when I washed the storm door.

That first happened years ago when we thought it was someone ringing our doorbell then running away at two in the morning. After a few times we figured out that a wind and rain storm had set it off.

The other evening I finally plopped down on the couch and relaxed. Then I sat bolt upright when I remembered I’d left the lower half of the storm door open.