When you hear certain sounds, you're right to be frightened

The sound I heard the other day was familiar, but it was out of the ordinary, too.

As my brain cells tried to figure out what the sound was or where it came from, I imagined a lot of possibilities -- all of them not quite right.

Then it came to me. The sound had a bit of metallic screech and just a hint of "sproinggg!" -- if you know what I mean.

That's it. Of course. How familiar this sound once was in all our lives.

It was the sound of a screen-door spring pulling a wood-frame and wire-mesh barrier closed with a little slap at the end, just enough to let you know that whoever went through the screen door also made sure it didn't close with a bang.

"Don't let the screen door slam!"

How many times did I hear that when I was growing up?

Our old farmhouse was built in the late 19th century when wood stoves provided heat both to stay warm and to cook. Those houses were firetraps. If a spark set a chimney on fire or the roof or whatever, there would be little chance to save it. Or the people inside.

So every room had an outside door as well as doors connecting the rooms to each other. The house had two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and a pantry. That's six outside doors. And six screen doors.

In the summer, all the doors were left unlocked during the day. "Locked" is little more than a figure of speech. The "lock" was a hook that latched the screen door's flimsy frame to the door jamb. No one wanted to mess with hooking and unhooking screen doors all day. So they stayed unhooked.

At night, however, everyone went to bed with a false sense of security. "Did you make sure the kitchen door is hooked?" someone would ask. Someone would check, just to be sure.

Now, any toddler could have pulled the screen door open, even if it was hooked. So much for protection from burglars. Thank goodness we all had doors to run out of, if the occasion arose.

I can only remember one time when any of us felt threatened by possible intruders. What woke me was that all-too-familiar sound that the spring on a screen door makes it is opened. This time, though, the "screeechsproinggg!" was preceded by the sound of the hook being forcefully undone. The sound included a bit of splintering that would have been caused by the eye screw being forced out of the door jamb.

My stepfather jumped out of bed and went to the small closet in the corner that held clothes and an arsenal of rifles for various types of hunting: little game, medium game and large game. He also grabbed the flashlight -- the one with four D batteries -- under the bed.

"Who's there?"

When a grown man shouts in the pitch dark of a summer night, it sounds like an artificial echo, and it seems to reverberate for several minutes.

And it can scare the pee-waddin' out of you. If you don't know what that is, that's OK. You get the idea.

Thankfully, whoever was trying to get into the house changed his mind and started running for the road in front of the house. In the dark, the old metal gate in the front-yard fence posed a bit of a challenge, but the intruder finally got it open with a "clank!" and headed for wherever.

Mind you, I can only remember one attempt to break into our house protected only by hooks on screen doors. But every time I hear a screen door sound -- this happens rarely any more -- I think of how that sound was an alarm, one that may have saved us from unknown harm.

In 1954, after electricity finally arrived at the farm, we took our one and only family vacation. We were going to be gone three weeks, which we could do because Lulu, the milk cow, had died. Imagine: three whole weeks of not having to milk the cow morning and night. That pretty much convinced me that there is a God.

My mother wondered if we should lock up the house, since we would be gone so long. Yes, we all agreed, that's the thing to do. But no one could remember where the key to the front door was. It had been an age since the key was last used. Finally, we went to Luna Hardware in town and bought a new key. It was the standard-issue skeleton key. It worked just fine -- just as it would have for any crook smart enough to stop by the hardware store and buy one.

Screen doors are few and far between these days, as are unlocked outside doors at your house. Or closets filled with Sunday clothes on hangers and various firearms on the floor.

Now we have electronic smoke detectors and security systems. They make a terrible racket when they are set off. As bad as they are, nothing sounds as frightening as a screen door going "screeechsproinggg!" in the dark of a dark summer night.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.