What Happens After Midnight

When I was younger, my mother always told me, “Nothing good happens after midnight.” My weekend curfew was midnight as long as I lived with my parents, even after I was twenty! Of course, I thought that it was a silly curfew and a paranoid way to look at the world to think nothing good happens after midnight.

As I got older and started paying attention to the news, I began to realize my mother was actually correct! Murders, rapes, car wrecks, etc., seem to mostly occur between midnight and six in the morning. Actually, my observations over the years lead me to believe that two in the morning is when things really begin to get ragged out in the world.

As can be expected, when I went off to college I was regularly out and about all hours of the night, sometimes dragging back to my dorm in the morning sun. We would stay out all night watching a lunar eclipse, or camping in line to get football tickets, or just sitting on a mountaintop solving all the world’s problems. I felt safe then, partially due to the ignorance of youth and partially due to being always surrounded by large groups of friends.

Now that I am a mother and I have curfews to set for my own kids, midnight is the chosen hour. As I said, maturity and experience taught me that being out and about  after midnight exponentially increases the chance of being involved in tragedy.

But I have to say that not EVERYTHING that happens after midnight is bad. This morning at 1:30, one of my dogs woke me up wanting to go outside. I let her out, then after a few minutes of waiting for her to return, decided to go outside and look for her. I grabbed a spotlight we keep charged up and handy—an important thing to have when you live in the country—slipped on some shoes, and went outside. First, my light found a pair of yellow eyes looking back at me just thirty feet away and not far from my chicken house. I kept looking at this pair of eyes until the creature decided to run for it. It was a fox! I shone further up the hill and found two pairs of yellow eyes. This time I was looking at two coyotes. Sweeping my light on around I found a small herd of deer at the crest of the hill. It is amazing what goes on all around me when I am (normally) sound asleep. Thankfully my chickens were locked up tight!

I thought about other times when we have gotten out of our warm beds, driven out to a hilltop, and lain in the bed of the truck watching meteor showers. And there was the time in South Texas when we loaded everyone up and drove out to a high spot near Choke Canyon Lake to watch the re-entering space shuttle fly over.

My husband told me a story about one time when he was in high school and he and some friends were camping out by the river. They saw what looked to be the most gigantic falling star of all time. They thought they were either hallucinating or had just witnessed an asteroid strike. The next day the news reported that a satellite had re-entered the atmosphere and had put on quite a light show in the process.

My conclusion is that as long as you are out in the country, after midnight can be fairly safe and quite interesting.  If you are in the city after midnight, it is best to make sure you are tucked in somewhere safe and can avoid the after-midnight meanness.