We'd had an enjoyable, relaxing walk in the ravine as usual, and made our way onto the street, then strolled down toward our house.  In the near distance we could see a handful of neighbours gathered on the front lawn of one of our good-neighbour friends, chatting animatedly.  When we reached the point where we were opposite them on the street, one walked down to greet us.

With the rather disconcertingly puzzling news that "our good friends" had dropped by, waited awhile, got out of their vehicle, looked around, decided not to await our return, then departed.  We asked for clarification: who were those "good friends"? to start with.  Grinning widely, our neighbour said, insouciantly, why it was the local police force. 

Visiting us?

Immediately it dawned upon me that something must have gone wrong when we set the alarm leaving the house.  This had occurred once before - at least six to eight years ago, when we were still giving all-day-care to our granddaughter, and in the melee of looking after her needs, and assembling ourselves, including the two little dogs, something had occurred out of the ordinary to distract us, and the back door had somehow been left ajar, triggering the alarm as we left for our walk.

On that occasion, on our return, settling on the back deck, we were surprised to see a young woman in uniform push through the back gate and approach us with a few questions; primarily, was everything in order?  It was, we assured her, then we heard the story from her of the local police detachment having had to send out a squad car because of a notification from our alarm company that something was amiss; they had been in cursory contact with our next-door-neighbour to determine whether it might be possible a break-in was in progress, but had received no satisfactory affirming collaboration.

We were issued with a fine, resulting from a false alarm.  We expect that something similar will occur on this occasion.  We discovered in the course of checking everything over that there had been nothing this time that we ourselves did to occasion the alarm that was still in progress when we arrived back home and turned it off, calling the alarm company to verify that all was well, but something had gone wrong. 

That "something", it turns out, is a malfunction in one of the motion detectors, for which solution a technician will arrive in the coming week to replace the aging mechanism.