It was a dark and sleepless night.

 

It was a dark and sleepless night.

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It was a dark and sleepless night, not a storm cloud in sight.

I did the usual when I don’t sleep. I gazed out the window. Turned from my right side to my left side. Threw back the blanket. Turned from my left side to my right side. Pulled up the blanket and tucked it around me, a cocoon. Too many times.

Sensible people, I am told, get up and do something. Binge on Netflix. Scrub the toilet. Read until their eyeballs fall out. Work an entire book of Sudoku. Drink a bottle of Old Grandad. Do something.

Not me. I lie in bed, very awake, and let my mind entertain me.

My mind thinks it knows everything. It doesn’t. It also thinks it is invincible. It thinks when I die it will go on living. We, me and my mind, have had conversations about this kind of stuff.  

We listened to road traffic. Car. Truck. Car. Big truck with jake brakes. There are a few haulers who like to race up to the first tope (speed bump) and slam the brakes. Evidently that satisfies something in their psyche. I wouldn’t know. I’m not a trucker.

In Etzatlan, I live a block off the highway, just off the edge of town limits.

In Oconahua, I will live on the far side of town, no highway in sight, on a cobble street going up the mountain to nowhere, among the last houses, no traffic. Please, soon.

I listen to the night birds, the tree frogs, to something that might be a kind of cricket.

My mind wants to visit the past. We argue. It wants to visit dark times I want to forget. I want to visit more pleasant memories. Why are the good times harder to hold onto, harder to dredge up the details?

In this tug of war, I roll over and toss off the blanket. Whoosh, a ripe avocado falls from the tree outside my bedroom window, through a crumple of thick leaves making a bumpity racket on the way to a hard landing on the ground.

I hear my dog on night patrol, whiffling along, checking out the disturbance. Dogs eat avocados.

My mind always wants to do a body scan, check for dire diseases. It will find them. I try to stomp that activity down before it gains momentum. An unnoticeable daytime twinge can and will, if fed and pampered, erupt into nighttime pain that only morphine will cure. I know. My mind tells me so.

Roll over, pull up the blanket. Just as my mind slows, almost restful, along comes a bobcat with its distinctive skunky reek. The bobcat sniffed around the tree and passed on to other hunting grounds.

Such was my night. I’ve learned to not fight it, to relax into it, whether this peculiar restlessness brings sleep eventually or not.

Want to hear something strange? I could have come up with any number of real things to worry about to keep me awake.

Real stuff, like health of family and friends, lack of money, questioning right or wrong of past decisions, writing script for if this or if that happens.

The possibility of Mt. Tequila erupting despite lack of activity for centuries, a rogue tsunami crossing a range of mountains and drowning all of us. Mass abduction of our community by aliens. You know, real stuff.

No, I stuck with the mundane, traffic noises, bouncing avocados and a roaming bobcat.

On a sleepless night, there is no understanding the quirks and quarks of my mind.

In the morning, I found on the ground, an avocado for the kitchen along with three seeds, licked clean.

On that sleepless night, it seemed, the whole season turned. I went to bed in summer. Didn’t sleep. Got out of bed in the newly turned fall.

The wind was blowing. Not a Montana wind. But wind enough to bend palm leaves and wave the stretched-out branches of the jacaranda. A cooler wind. A wind that chased the daily 99% humidity down to 50%. Oh, blessed wind.

The air smelled like spices, autumn air.

In the sky white puffs scudded along the blue like pleasure boats in a bay. Not a gray rain cloud in sight. Yesterday was summer. Today is autumn. Tonight I will sleep like a rock.

Sondra Ashton

HWC: Looking out my back door

September 12, 2024

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“When The Frost Is On The Pumpkin”

“When The Frost Is On The Pumpkin”

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            “And the fodder’s in the shock.” James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet”. He wrote in dialect and I loved it. I memorized that entire poem in southern Indiana hillbilly style in third grade at Elizabeth. I like to think I was more in love with the season than the poet. No matter where I’ve lived, autumn has been special to me.

            That is, until I got to Mexico. In Mazatlan, on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, with desert a mere short drive inland, where I lived two and a half years, I could barely distinguish one season from another. Summertime brought torrential rains, short lived, usually at night. Summer was green. Winter tended more toward a lesser green with speckles of gray-brown.

            Here in Etzatlan, snugged against the hills in the high Sierra Madre valley near Guadalajara, summer is officially over; the rainy season has drifted away until next June. Corn stalks zoom even higher than elephants’ eyes. By the end of October, men will swarm into corn with machetes and stack the fodder into shocks. Cane reaches upward visibly day by day. Peppers soon will be ready for harvest and shipment all over the world.

            I’ve always been an avid weather watcher; too many Montana years where weather personified is a psychopath which might turn on one in a heartbeat. I’ve lived in many places but Montana is always “home”.

I’ve been in Etzatlan seven months. It’s the beginning of fall and I’m trying my best to find the errant season. Spring, March and April, were hot and dry. That is all messed up! Summer hot and wet with cool nights, ideal. I keep looking for signs of the fall season according to those which I remember best. None have appeared. What I do find baffles me.

            A huge tree at the corner of my garden resembles a floral umbrella, vibrant green leaves patterned with orange trumpet-like bouquets. Plants and bushes which bloomed in the spring are again in bloom, some for the third time. My bottle brush tree is full of red brushes and hummingbirds. How do they do that? Some never stop blooming. Like the lilies. And the roses.

That’s another thing. What are roses doing in this sub-tropical region? Brought here by gringos, no doubt. Yet every vivero (nursery) has a selection of roses. Leaf-cutter ants feast on my roses. These voracious critters form an assembly line and strip a rose bush in minutes. I’ve timed them. Once roses have been reduced to naked stalks, they turn their attention to the young oleander and baby hibiscus I just planted. To stop them I’ve, with requisite guilt, resorted to sprinkling a vile yellow powder while wearing rubber gloves and a face mask. I boil my body afterward.

I’m harvesting my first limes from the baby tree I planted in April. Oranges are forming on my new trees, barely as tall as me. I’ve no idea if they are in season or out of season. What is the season?

Canaries are returning from the north. I’ve seen the first two pairs this week. Ha! There’s another returned bird searching for bugs on my brick wall. He is a variety of woodpecker, the size of a chickadee.

And the “sheets” are back. They weren’t gone long. I call them sheets because this butterfly, the size of a saucer, floats in the air like a bed sheet on the line, gently shifting in the breeze.

Breeze? That’s another difference between here and there. The weather forecast this morning predicted winds from two to four miles per hour. Two to four? Is that measurable? Any self-respecting Montana wind would sneer at such a wimp.

Real winds, when they happen, seem to foretell incoming rain, whipping with intensity for ten or fifteen minutes. Then the wind falls off, raindrops start, the wind moves the clouds on over to the neighbors. I’m just describing what I’ve experienced.

But it is only the end of September. Maybe frost will rime the pumpkin yet. My neighbor told me last year one morning in January the top of his car was covered with frost. Big whoop, right!

I can still recite Riley’s entire poem and if I close my eyes, I can see the changes, smell the season. Birds and butterflies are great. But I’d love to see the gathering of the elk at Slippery Anne. I may have to get a ticket home.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

September 29, 2016

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