hope for the best

I had a somewhat alarming conversation this morning with the next door neighbor. With whom we've gotten to be on pretty good "chatting over the fence" terms lately, which makes me happy. Anyway, I went out early to toss something in the garbage can, and the neighbor spotted me and came over.

She told me that yesterday her son was home alone and saw a stranger walking around their house, looking in the windows.The man apparently seemed to be looking for an entry point, and spent a lot of time examining the gate into their backyard. Which they keep locked when they aren't home. According to the boy, the man then went to the next house (not ours, on the other side) and walked around behind the house. Then he crossed the street and did the same examination of a house over there.

My neighbor said that she called the cops and asked them to drive around the neighborhood. She said she looked for us last night but we weren't in the yard like usual (I had a tough afternoon that ran late into the evening, don't ask) and she didn't want to come into the yard and knock on the door because of our dogs. She also said that the older lady who lives behind them reported that while she was out a few days ago, someone entered her house through a window and left out the front door, leaving the front door standing open.

So, I'm trying not to worry too much about all this. There are several possible explanations:

• It could be nothing. The boy could have seen the meter man, or someone who was lost, or something. And the old lady might have left her door ajar and it blew open. That happened to me once. And she said nothing was stolen, which is highly unlikely if an intruder was alone in her house.
• It's possible that someone really was walking around the neighborhood looking for vulnerable houses, and gave our house a pass because of the dogs. They're inside when we're not home and they make a lot of noise when someone approaches. Thirteen can't tell who it is anymore because of her deafness, and she even barks at me.
• And it's possible (though not likely) that someone was walking around the neighborhood looking for vulnerable houses, and plans to continue, and hasn't gotten to us yet. Which could be bad since the house is empty right now. Okay, note to self, don't think about that!

Following the philosophy of "hope for the best, prepare for the worst" we locked the porch door and the windows this morning. We usually leave the windows open, weather permitting. This weekend I will look into getting locks for the two gates on our fence. One of the gates is only 3 feet tall so a lock would be fairly symbolic. But still, if a burglar is looking for an easy target then I guess every little bit helps.

We've been pretty slack about protecting the house from break-ins; I guess it takes a scare like this to make you start thinking about it. I'm going to look into strategies that don't involve an alarm system. Which wouldn't be very effective unless we started closing all the windows all the time. Which I really don't want to do.

The dogs are still our best deterrent, I think. I strongly believe they are the reason I never got broken into, all those years I lived on the edge of a bad part of Walltown. This won't help immediately of course, but I like the idea of planting thorny climbing roses under the windows. Unfortunately the most vulnerable windows (the ones you can't see from the road) are also the most shady & not good for roses. Note to self: do some research on thorny shrubs and vines that like shade. Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems to me that if I were a burglar and I had to climb over a bunch of thorns to get through a window, inside of which a dog was barking its head off at me, I'd move on to the next house.