Counting Flowers When the Sheep Don’t Show Up

Can dahlias cure my midnight fits of fear?

Take Wednesday night for example. It’s 1 a.m., I’m lying in bed wide awake, and I have one of those fear fits. I don’t know if you have these, but for me they come on in the wee hours, only in the dark. They usually happen shortly after I’ve closed the book I’m reading, turned off the bedside lamp, stretched out my muscles, pulled the cool sheets and warm comforter up around my chin, reached out to touch my husband’s snoring body, and said my prayers.

I should be easily drifting off to sleep; my muscles are well-exercised after walking up and down the hill from the house to the hoop house 400 times moving plants around. It has been a long, good day. I’ve met all my work deadlines. I’ve talked to sober people. I’ve made a nice dinner. I’ve transplanted 40 leggy tomato seedlings into sturdy pots. I’ve listened to three different people who desperately needed ears on their problems. (This is something I’m trying to be better at: listening.) I’ve done everything I was supposed to do, I think. I didn’t even eat a lot of chocolate!

So my brain should let me off the hook. But after sending the searchlight around to every corner looking for something I can feel bad about, it comes up a little short. (It can’t quite reach the corners where I’m hiding the worst stuff, the bits of shame and regret that will forever cling to the cobwebs no matter how much I dust.) So instead it flashes the beam straight into my eyes and I freeze. I am literally frozen with fear. It’s palpable; my skin tingles and my heart races. I lie on my back with my fists clenched by my side and wait for it to pass.

The weird thing is that when this happens, typically I’m not at all sure of what I am afraid. The dark? Nothingness? Sleep itself? Maybe it’s simply a garden-variety fear of death, the kind we all supposedly have. Certainly I think there’s a bit of panic that I will never be able to do everything I want to do in life in the short amount of time we’re given. Or that I won’t get enough years with the man I love, to whom it took me so long to make my way. Whatever it is, it only manifests itself in the dark, late at night, when I have stopped occupying my brain with words or crafts or problem solving.

Brown Sugar and Bumble Rumble

My resting state is not pretty. I’m not sure I even have one. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been a night owl, why I drank myself to sleep for so many years. Or why even now, I can’t even contemplate going to bed as early as 10 or 11 o’clock at night. When I have to get up early in the morning, I just live with five or six hours of sleep. The healthy aging experts do not like this kind of behavior! I know this from reading the AARP magazine cover to cover every month (tee-hee).

The other night the fear was kind enough to define itself so starkly that I woke up my husband.

“I’m afraid I’m never going to see Dad again,” I say. Note: I just saw him two months ago, and I make a point not to go more than three or four months without a visit. But he’s almost 93! This is probably a control issue on my part. I think if I see him more, then when the inevitable phone call comes, which might be this year or it might come five or six or eight years from now, it won’t be as much of a shock, won’t leave me feeling like I’ve missed too many opportunities.

I say to my husband, I’ll call Dad tomorrow. (And I do, even though I’m not a big phone talker and I know it will be a 45-minute conversation. I’d so much rather talk to him in person.)

And my husband says, we’ll plan our next trip to Delaware.

That makes me feel enormously better – just the idea of planning our next visit. The fear subsides enough that now I am just left with the usual trouble I have falling asleep.

Maarn, Hamilton Lillian, Parkland Glory, Jowey Frambo, Gitt’s Crazy, Omega

So I count flowers in my head. I inherited my plant obsession from my Dad — my sister has it, too — so this seems appropriate. And since I’ve been potting up my dahlia tubers, I decide to tick off my (growing) list of dahlia varieties.

First I visualize the ones I planted last year, in the fenced garden, in one long raised bed, left to right, shorter to taller: Bumble Rumble, Brown Sugar, Omega, Hamilton Lillian, Crichton Honey, Noordwijks Glorie, Parkland Glory, Breakout, Karma Gold, Otto’s Thrill, Labyrinth, Thomas Edison, Gitt’s Crazy, Rip City, Jowey Frambo.  

Maarn

Then I list the three new ones I bought last summer at a local nursery: Orange and Snow (so pretty!) wound up in a big pot; Star’s Lady and Hollyhill Jitterbug went straight into the ground in a perennial bed and did not get eaten by deer.

Oh, and I forgot about the Bishop of Llandaff– a prolific, single-petaled orange-red flower with purple stems and leaves that was one of the first dahlias I ever bought. I put all the Bishop tubers in pots on the deck.

Bishop of Llandaff

And over the winter, I mail-ordered five new tubers to grow this year: Appleblossom, Blah Blah Blah, Cornel Bronze, Totally Tangerine, and Linda’s Baby. I try to imagine their colors and the shape of their blooms.

Breakout

There’s more! This week I went to a dahlia sale/swap at a friend’s house. I am officially a dahlia nerd now – this is year four of growing them for me, and my tubers are reproducing like bunnies. I thought I might be able to get rid of some extras, and I did, but I came home with six more new varieties. I can just barely remember what they are as I begin to get sleepy: Mystique, Polka, Bloomquist York, Star Child, Penhill Watermelon and Camano Zoe.

By the time I get to thinking about the varieties that are still on my wishlist, well, I am not thinking about the varieties that are still on my wishlist — or anything else. 

Bumble Rumble

Under the best of circumstances, this flower-counting/listing/visualizing thing puts me to sleep. As it did on Wednesday. I think.

But sometimes I worry that cranking my brain up even for this type of benign activity is going to delay sleep even more.

So I have one other technique I use some nights — when I can remember to try it. It’s the closest I get to meditation or meditative prayer, a vestige of the centering prayer practice I learned in early sobriety but didn’t fully stick with. I slowly breath in and then let my breath out, repeating a phrase that is sort of an acknowledgment of a divine presence. It’s calming. And I think it works. Though FYI centering prayer is not supposed to make you fall asleep – it’s meant to help you get closer to God. But I have co-opted it to do double duty.

I’m never truly sure what works, because in the morning I can only remember the waking parts. And sometimes the sleeping parts – the dreams. But not the moment when the lights go out. 

Now it is Friday night, 11:15 p.m. I think I will step away from the keyboard and the blue light right this very minute and look at a picture book of flowers. Let’s hope the flowers win this round.

Hamilton Lillian