I trotted out last night to burn some paper garbage in our burn barrel and had just gotten a leaping, bright fire worthy of front-page mention on a shitty local evening newscast when a car slowly drove by on the side road by our house with its lights off. It went down to the T intersection at the end of the road, turned its lights on, and turned right. “Strange,” I thought to myself, watching flames envelop the papers and cardboard. But this is Sheffield — small town of 960-odd people. Weird things happen from time to time. Being surrounded by cornfields kinda does that to you.

As I stood there, mesmerized by the roaring inferno in front of me, it happened again — the same car, sans exterior illumination, but this time it stopped in front of the neighbor’s house. “Hrm,” I thought, knowing that there is at least one teenage girl living at that house and wondering if this could be someone coming by to “visit”.

Sure enough, with the precision of a surgeon disconnecting a major artery, I heard the driver attempt to eek the door open. It was an almost completely calm night with very little background noise, meaning that I could hear every squeak and creak as the guy inched it open little by little. I have no doubt, given his extreme care, that he was cringing and losing a few minutes of his life every time the well-worn vehicle let out a squawk from its hinges. Had it not been a rusty old vehicle, it might have worked. The reality was that it sounded like two can openers trying to screw quietly enough so as to not wake up the kids.

Eventually he got the door open, stepped out, and repeated the painstaking process of closing the door. I chuckled to myself as I could only imagine his beating heart at that moment. Ah, young love pursuits in the depths of night; how I miss those so…not.

He approached the house and began walking around, looking into the windows. There were a few lights on, but not tons. Eventually, he came back around to my side and the side door, where the teenage girl appeared at the window. She made some sort of recognition to him, and then looked past him and saw me standing there, tending my fire. I wasn’t looking directly, only out of the corner of my eyes, but I saw her suddenly get really annoyed.

She made a gesture and came around to open the door for the guy. They must have both gone to the same British covert operations school, as the Door Opening Ceremony again commenced. Turning into a snake, the guy slithered into the house with all the grace of a burglar.

For the next 15 minutes or so, one of them would appear at the window momentarily to see if I was still out there or not. You could just feel the daggers I was receiving from them each time they caught sight of me.

I eventually figured that they weren’t about to do anything interesting as long as I stayed there, my fire had burned down to a steady glow, and my toes were getting cold from the dew-soaked grass, so I picked up my things and trudged back inside, shutting off the outside light after a minute or two. I went upstairs and into the darkened north bedroom, however, and sat a vigil, watching the house.

On their next visit to the window to peek they were terribly excited and the girl made some sort of gesture. I don’t exactly know what it meant because within the next couple of minutes, all of the lights in the house went off. I thought that a bit strange, but perhaps they were ready to retire to the couch to watch, The Price is Right.

Unfortunately, that was the most excitement of the evening as nothing else happened and I got tired of watching after a bit so went off to do other things. I had an incredible desire to do something like find an air horn and sound it off outside the window or let the air in the guy’s tires out or something, as it would have been highly amusing. Alas, my sense of betterment got to me and wrestled the amusement to the ground, pinning it and choking the life out of it. But I at least got the pleasure of shaking my head like the old man I am and saying to myself, “Tut, tut — kids these days.”

This morning the car was gone, supposedly leaving sometime in the darkness of the night, probably with lights off, his “mission” completed.