Blackbirds, and cows, and the dead of night

Just a few minutes ago, I had a long exhale. Not an actual exhale, though I had plenty of those, too, but one of those extended feelings of release, where you just let go, a bit, of the tension that came before. Dido seems to be on the mend (and, I busted him for faking some of his reactions to his discomfort--that whole wincing and moaning thing? Yep. Fake. When he's actually all better, we'll talk about that one.) The H, after a truly horrible day yesterday dealing with two pieces of Really Bad News, is dealing well with one and taking the other one more or less in stride, looking for the lessons in it, and so on. Vous, the au pair, came home from her art class and almost instantly dove into an involved game of the Babe's invention, involving babies, blankets, monsters and, I'm sure, something scatalogical. And me? I sat on the front porch, feeling the pre-storm air and listening to the call of the red winged blackbird, two staccato whistles followed by a drawn out third note. I'm noticing the un-quiet here lately: the frogs are so loud at night it sounds like a truck driving by (the sound of vibration, without the sensation) and last night, during an outrageous (and these days, frequent, sorry to say) bout of insomnia, I could have sworn I heard a lost cow somewhere nearby. For a while, I entertained the idea that it was actually the black bear that everyone but me seems to have seen (kind of like the fox last year--this year, I've seen more of him than I care to) but I'm pretty sure it was bovine, not ursine. John says he heard it this morning, around five, and I heard it at two, so unless it was a shared hallucination, I think one of our neighbors' girls went wandering. We have dairy farms down both roads that lead towards our house, large ones, and I have yet to tire of seeing the cows in the fields as I drive by.