It's 430 AM and I am wide awake. Sounds terrible but it is usually 2:00 AM when I am wide awake and looking for something to do. If you live alone the possibilities are unlimited. You can run the vacuum cleaner, fire up your Jane Fonda exercise video, rearrange the living room furniture or organize your closet. But common courtesy for the innocent bed partner demands both relative quietude and reasonable darkness. Both are hard to come by in this household. Who needs anightlight? Our darkness twinkles with red and green power strips and sleeping appliances.
At any rate I have decamped to the upstairs porch, not quite weather tight but devoid of mosquitoes and creepy crawlers. The ubiquitous LEDs are replaced by stars that twinkle through the sunblock fabric curtains and the night has that damp, sweet feel of air not cycled through an air conditioning system. In old times, houses in the south had sleeping porches where people could escape the swelteringly interior rooms and catch a cool night breeze. The invention of air conditioning brought progress and industry to the south but a hermetically sealed house separates us from nighttime serenades by crickets and frogs, whippoorwills and splashing mullet. Progress has its price.
If I had to go to work at 8:00 AM I could not be so sanguine about my insomnia. But retirement has its privileges and one of them is napping on demand. I do have an early doctor's appointment. While
not my orthopod, he will ask me how my shoulder is and I will be happy to report my operated shoulder is the least of my medical problems!
But such light is not adequate to balance one's check book or do your fingernails or read a novel. And a 100 watt bulb in the downstairs bedroom has a way of twisting and bending its light rays so they creep up the stairs and shine in the eyes of a sleeping husband. Thank goodness for the illuminated screen of an iPad. With its brightness value turned down the glow from the screen is tolerable. Used to be our neighbor's Spotlight, mounted on his dock, shined directly in our bedroom window. Enough to cast a shadow. But either the bulb burned out, the salt air has corroded the connections or some irate neighbor has taken a BB gun to the problem.
At any rate I have decamped to the upstairs porch, not quite weather tight but devoid of mosquitoes and creepy crawlers. The ubiquitous LEDs are replaced by stars that twinkle through the sunblock fabric curtains and the night has that damp, sweet feel of air not cycled through an air conditioning system. In old times, houses in the south had sleeping porches where people could escape the swelteringly interior rooms and catch a cool night breeze. The invention of air conditioning brought progress and industry to the south but a hermetically sealed house separates us from nighttime serenades by crickets and frogs, whippoorwills and splashing mullet. Progress has its price.
If I had to go to work at 8:00 AM I could not be so sanguine about my insomnia. But retirement has its privileges and one of them is napping on demand. I do have an early doctor's appointment. While
not my orthopod, he will ask me how my shoulder is and I will be happy to report my operated shoulder is the least of my medical problems!
