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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Musings, Observations, and Outright Guesses

Musings, Observations, and Outright Guesses

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I could have said ‘outright lies’ but I have no blessed idea how I am going to fill this page so ‘guesses’ seemed the more appropriate word.

Most weeks I know exactly what I want to say. It never comes out the way I think it will, but I have a definite idea to start. ‘I can’t wait to talk about that.’ Or, ‘I want to tell them this little story.’

This has been a strangely blank week. Maybe it is the gray skies, make me feel like I followed my son Ben home to Poulsbo, Washington; gray, grim, unrelenting wet.

“Where is the sunshine?” I ask as if it is my God-given right to expect sun every morning by 11:00 just because it is the usual way of the day unfolding here in my magical bit of Mexico.

There has not been enough sun to outline the clouds; dark and dreary and low and heavy hangs the ceiling, solid. Every day rain is forecast. Every day I think of Chicken Little and look for the sky to fall.

Then it did—fall—in fulsome wet steady streams, all night, all day, all night, relentless and unruly. Forecast today, ‘partly sunny’. Sol made a cameo appearance about 4:15 just prior to the wind gathering out of seemingly nowhere, bringing more rain. Rained all night, again.

Ten days of grim and gray, for me, translates to heated teakettles of water, sponge baths and hair-shampoos in the kitchen sink. I have a solar water heater and about the fifth gray day, water is best described as tepid. It is a minor inconvenience at most. Only happens once, rarely twice a year.

Worst are the feelings of vague ennui and low-level depression. Boredom? How can that be? I’m never bored, despite the fact I generally spend a good portion of each day outside. When gray generates cold. I huddle in my chair, lap blanket cover my legs, book in hand, sitting in the waft of warm air generated by my tiny tower heater. 

At least the rain brought a satisfaction of action—at last—something is happening.

But all along, every day I have activity, so why the lassitude? The lethargy?

My son flew back home. I had three weeks of his full-time care and coddling plus hot, vicious two-handed pinochle in which he trounced me. I loved every minute of it. It was time for him to go home.

Sadly. 

I can care for myself with a minimum of help from neighbors, most of whom visit daily. They come with stories, with hugs, with soup, casseroles, bone broth and cookies. Cousin Nancie who lives to bake brought a huge piece of white cake with coconut frosting. Hard to stay down in the dumps with such attention.

Miguel is my physical therapist, a kind young man who gives me treatments which make each cell seem to open like a flower and breathe. Then he ruins the effects with orders for daily exercises. But I do them, diligently. Pain is negligible.

My balance is incredible, comparatively speaking, as is my walking. How could one walk well lurching along like Chester in “Gunsmoke”, half a block behind, hollering, Mister Dillon! Mister Dillon! Five years of misery that could have been avoided had I know my leg was fixable.

Jerry and Lola are here from Idaho. Jerry and I are Harlem High classmates. This is my friends’ third visit with me here in Etzatlan. They are staying at the restored Hacienda El Carmen not far from my home. Today eight of us, me and my neighbors, Jerry and Lola, met at the Hacienda for a lovely lunch and three hour visit. I saw my friends from Oconahua. Kathy from Victoria phoned. I do not lack company.

I worry about my daughter who is overworked and overwrought. I fear for her health, but will she listen to her mother? No! She is too much like her mother.

I worry about my friend in Oregon who has a malady that is not fixable. I do not want her to bear the pain and to gradually lose functions. She is too vital.

I worry about another friend in Washington, worry that he has given up, is making do, is feeling real despair, not this shadow of despair I flirt with, knowing tomorrow the sun will shine.

It will. It is forecast and it will happen. Manana. Which might be tomorrow. Or possibly the next day.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

February 6, 2020

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