Winter came hard last weekend to the four-state area.  A January storm brought single-digit temperatures and howling, arctic, winds of more than 30 MPH to my little town, and the wind chill dipped into the negative numbers once the sun went down.  As locals put it – it was “damn cold out”.  It was a good night to stay in, get under lots of blankets on the bed, and ride out the storm – fast asleep.

At least, that was the plan.

Unfortunately, the power went out in Clear Spring at about 10:00 P.M.  A local transformer fire shut out every light in town – along with all of the electric baseboard heating in my 1927-built home.  Still, I figured that the power company would have things sorted out in a short time – and I was headed for dream land under the blankets, so the worst-case scenario would be that the house would be colder than usual come morning.

I rolled over at about 02:30 A.M. and noticed that the lights were still out, checking the time on my mobile phone (as my bedside table clock was still dark and unresponsive).  I sleepily noted that the power outage was longer than usual, but yawned and was just starting to slip back into slumber when I first heard it.

“Chirp!”

It was faint, and I thought that maybe I dreamed it.

In about thirty seconds, I heard it again.

“Chirp!”

If you own a home, you know what that sound is – and once you hear it, you cannot “un-hear” it.

Somewhere in this house, one of my smoke alarms was beeping that its battery was dying.

Why does this always happen in the middle of the night?  Why can’t it occur at 6:30 P.M. – or even 9:00 A.M. in the morning?

I had just changed all of the batteries in these contraptions not more than a month ago (when another early morning “chirp” had sent me scrambling to replace all of the batteries in every unit in the house to avoid just this sort of event).

But there it was, after another 30-40 seconds.  Unmistakable.

“Chirp!”

Well, no use trying to go back to sleep, for slumber will not come – at least not with that incessant and constant noise taking place every minute of the rest of the night.  So, I cursed the cold bedroom, got up, and started my search.  I fumbled around in the dark until I located a small flashlight in my office, then proceeded from room to room, pausing under each unit, waiting for that God-awful noise.

I went down to the basement.  Nothing.

I checked all the units on the first floor.  Still nothing, but I could still hear it going off every half minute or so.

I opened up the doors in the kid’s rooms upstairs, as the noises were louder from up there (FYI – they were sleeping through all of this, mind you – until a madman with a flashlight came creeping into their bedrooms at “o-dark-thirty”.  It took a while to calm each of them down and assure them that all was well, to simply ignore the crazy man with the light, and to try to go back to sleep).

Still, the chirping persisted.

Only one place left to look.

I opened the door to our attic (it has walk-up stairs, similar to the attic on the TV show, “The Brady Bunch” – if you’re of a certain age).  The chirp was now clear and distinct.

I have a smoke detector in the attic?  I never even knew.

So, up I went – into the cold space of the attic, wearing nothing but my underwear and a T-shirt, barefoot, clutching a small flashlight, and trying not to step on any live mousetraps I had loaded and ready on the floor.  I grabbed a chair amongst the clutter, held the flashlight in my teeth, reached up over my head into the rafters and just barely could reach that white disk of doom, clinging to a beam and taunting me with a red wink.  I twisted the unit to get it down, revealing that it was wired into the house electrical wiring.

It all made sense now.  No electricity means no power to the smoke alarm, which was trying to run on battery back-up.  I popped the battery case open, and found an ancient 9-volt battery that was probably old enough to vote (do they even make “Radio Shack” batteries anymore?)

It mocked me, that battery – and I cursed it in foggy exhales of breath as I pried it from the alarm, killing the chirp and bringing back an eerie calm to the cold, attic space.

Once again, man is victorious over machine, and I returned to my bed, leaving the smoke alarm and its battery companion alone to suffer the cold night on their own and to think about their actions.  I would fix it all in the morning – AFTER I got up.

Maybe I should install one of those ten year, sealed-case smoke alarms up there.

Perhaps I won’t be awakened again until 2029, but by then – maybe I’ll be too old to even hear it.