The Sidebar: Find Your People
Plus: The best things I ate/read/heard this week, #100DaysOfFlowers, and Savoy Sugar Snap Slaw.
1. Night shades
The nights are warm now and the windows wide open. Our bed is such that I lie right beneath a twin set of windows. When the breeze shuffles through the screens and paws at me like a frisky kitten, I feel like I’m at camp again, fifty years ago, on my top bunk, pretending I’m on a boat: I am watching the heat lightening in the distance over the river, listening to the snoring of my cabinmates, and huddling in the dip of my saggy mattress under my starched white cotton sheet and scratchy wool blanket. I am clutching Raggedy Ann, who traveled to camp with me for 12 years. The breeze is strong and the wooden shutters are rattling. I am wondering if a storm is coming and if the counselors will have to leap out of bed and run outside to close the shutters against the torrents that will otherwise breach the screens and soak our beds.
Even then I was awake when everyone else was asleep.
But here in the present, I lie on my side and squeeze my eyes shut against the moonlight. I have an eye mask but I don’t like to wear it. I listen for Trusty Friend, our resident screech owl. He can be very chatty. We’ve named him Trusty Friend after the tragic strigiformes in Anthony Doerr’s novel Cloud Cuckoo Land. (You can actually get a Trusty Friend owl tee-shirt.)
Sleep is often elusive for me, as I’ve mentioned many times before. But lately this problem has been epic, my own little Shakespearean drama. Flower-counting is no help. Getting up and taking Advil and drinking warm milk (both of which usually make me sleepy) has not helped. Reading has not made me sleepy. (Right now I’m reading The Angel Makers: Arsenic, A Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring by Patti McCracken, and the whole arsenic thing is maybe not so comforting).
So many hours go by that I finally give up on trying to achieve drowsiness and do something productive. The other night I researched tulips and narcissus and placed my entire fall bulb order online at 3:30 a.m. The next day my husband was like, “What? You stayed up all night AND you ordered 250 daffodils that we’re going to have to plant?” Poor man.
I’m quite sure that my habit of eating chocolate chips after dinner – while I’m working – is not helping this situation. I’m quite sure that staying on the computer until midnight is also not helping this situation. I’m quite sure that I’m just an idiot when it comes to forming good sleep habits. Sorry, just putting that out there. I have no better way to explain it.
I was at a 12-step meeting the other night where a friend shared that she’s sleeping better now that she’s going to more meetings. She said she’s not lying awake as often listening to the crazy voices in her head chattering away.
“Aha!” I thought. “That is a good tactic – I should try it.” (It being going to more meetings.)
I mean, honestly Susie – duh. Sixteen years sober and I still can’t remember that everything is always better when I go to more meetings. I could probably count 65 reasons why this is true if I thought about it, but a lot of it boils down to this: I get in that room and realize I’m not alone in my crazy behaviors. I begin to hear the reminders that I so badly need – that I’m not in control of everything, that I need to constantly let go of things, that I cannot afford to isolate or drift away from the pack, or I might get picked off and wind up back out there in the storm. And I am reminded that these are my people.
A gentle rain is falling tonight. I am hoping it will rock me to sleep. Me and my people.