Last night was a catastrophe! I was sitting at the skirted round table in my room busy checking email on my laptop. It was about nine o'clock. All at once I heard a piercing chirp. About 30 seconds later, I heard it again. The pattern repeated. I got up and went out into the hallway and listened. I was pretty sure that what I was hearing was the sound a smoke detector makes when its batteries are signalling that they are about to give up the ghost. With my door open, the sound was even more piercing. I looked up and saw where I thought the sound was coming from, the familiar round white apparatus hugging the ceiling. It's chirp at this closer range was almost painful. I went back inside my room and closed the door, imagining what it would be like to try to sleep, muffling the sound with ear plugs and a pillow.

This was the beginning of the long three-day fourth of July holiday weekend. I sat down to contemplate my situation, the chirping still vibrant through the door. I had to do something. There was no one but me staying in the Gilmor Sloane this weekend. All the regular staff, including the maintenance people had gone home and presumably would not be back on the property until Tuesday morning. I reached for my recently acquired directory of Center staff names and numbers. I remembered the maintenance man's name was Andy. I found his number and with apologies called, explaining my predicament. He said he would come in a half an hour. He lived about thirty miles away. Twenty minutes later the phone rang and I heard Pam's voice on the other end. Pam is a friend from my seminary days who pastors a nearby church part-time and also lives and volunteers at Stony Point. She had been working late in the front office and had picked up the ringing phone. Andy had called to say he would not be coming.

There was nothing to do but call Rick on his cell. I knew he and his wife, Kitty, had gone sailing. It was a rare time together for this busy couple on the night before Rick was to leave for General Assembly. Rick had called it a "date." I hated to call him, but with more apologies, I once again explained my situation. Forty minutes later, Rick arrived with ladder and batteries in hand. He immediately went to work, but he was unable to locate where the worn batteries were housed. The detector was hard wired to the ceiling. After several minutes of struggle, he managed to disassemble the lower part of the unit from the base, only to discover that it had no batteries! As he was trying to reassemble it and return it to its position on the ceiling, the fire alarm went off. We both scrambled, Rick to the control panel downstairs to turn the alarm off and I to my cell phone to try to call the fire department to stop them from coming. But I was too late. By the time I got a human voice on the other end of the phone, the trucks had been dispatched and there was no stopping them. So at 11:00 at night three fire trucks roared up to the darkened mansion at Stony Point Center.

The local chief was furious. Already edgy about fire on this Fourth of July weekend, he and his trucks had been called to Stony Point three times during this very week on false alarms triggered by dust during a construction project in one of the other houses. This was not how to build community relationships! I heard the angry chief's frustrated shouting and Rick's gentle cajoling and I wanted to disappear back to California!

It was finally calm in the grand old house by midnight. Rick and his ladder drove off after replacing batteries in a nearby carbon monoxide detector, which turned out to be the real culprit. I sat upright in my bed for several minutes in the quiet stillness before turning out the light. I slid down into the coolness of the sheets, smiled at the folly of it all and drifted off to sleep. Another day at Stony Point had passed.