It’s hot. The dog has thrown herself from the bed into a dramatic pile. She sighs and pants in her sleep, annoyed and restless. She is old and soft in the middle. We are kin. I have turned the thermostat to Frigidaire. The heat pump churns to cool us, the hum delivering me into the audio of a tractor in a distant field. The drone of disc and plow labor hard against cracked, dry earth and seething summer. The dust of the dream wakes me with a cough and now my sleep can find no toehold.
My husband snores rhythmically with little puffs of air on the exhale. Inhale, pufft, inhale, pufft. I find it endearing to watch him, his brow furrowed, the boy of his face emerging from the wrinkles and night stubble of the man. I grin the smile of a shared bed.
I walk down the stairs. I’m not creeping or stepping carefully. My family slumbers hard and they are vaccinated against nocturnal risings. The house was first built in 1898. Additions and upgrades have changed its footprint, but its bones are old. We are kin. Our contractor found a shoe in an original wall. It was a black brogan and the legend goes that it was placed there to ward off ghosts or assist with fertility. We wrote a letter to the shoe thanking it for its years of service and secured it for a new term of watch in the attic above our bedroom.
My uterus is long retired so we won’t know the effectiveness of its reproductive power. As for the ghosts, there are spirits here. Perhaps they once wore the footwear of the attic guard or maybe the shoe permits welcomed haints. I would describe them as showing up in the form of energy, stirring the hairs on the back of my neck, causing me to glance around, but energy is tired and hyper-used to describe beverages and people and mattresses and charkras stones. There is something supernatural keeping me company in the dark and it feels pleasant and peaceful, so I sit beside it at the table, friendly like. We are kin.
It is the 5th of July. Imagine being plain ole 5th of July. Juxtaposed to the 4th with her fancy pants parades, celebrations, cookouts and fireworks. And then here comes the 5th, the girl next door. Boring in her everyday-ness, jolting us back to a life of work and taxes and taking out the garbage. Snatching us into dental appointments and errands and the bland of our existence. Most days are July 5ths.
I want coffee but it will aggravate my insomnia. I want wine but drinking at 2:00 am suggests problems bigger than those that interrupted my field of dreams. Besides, everything in our kitchen is automated and thunderous, (coffee grinder, battery powered wine opener.) The tranquility seems important so I settle with a glass of water from the tap. It’s wet and sufficient. The spirit-energy-ghost-haint isn’t thirsty.
I am thinking of my granny. Once when I was staying with her, I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The door was open and I could see her at 2:00 a.m. sitting in a straight back lawn chair out in the yard. She was dressed in her quilted pink house coat with matching bedroom slippers. I went out and sat with her. I didn’t ask what she was doing and she didn’t offer an explanation. We sat listening to the sounds of the shadows. It’s surprisingly loud, rural nightlife. It’s a noisy backdrop, an entomological and zoological choir, both unsettling and lulling.
My granny spent her life in an A-line dress accessorized by an apron. She married my granddaddy when she was 15 and birthed nine children. She got her driver’s license when she turned 50. Her relationship with my mother was complicated, but with me it was pure and easy love. I would fist fight you right now for one of her lard biscuits. Her lifetime or means didn’t offer the internet or Netflix or a mobile device or a Louis Vuitton. She was a gentle, Bible toting, canning, smocking, shotgun shooting, farming badass. She wouldn’t have read a book about The Art of Nothing or contemplated 100 ways to relax because idleness was the work of the devil. She was busy, that woman. She was also content and confident in her middle age to be up at night, sitting in the yard, offering no excuse or reason. She wasn’t worried about sleeplessness as morning would come along directly and her rest patterns would work themselves out, as most things are apt to do. We are kin.
I wonder now what granny was thinking about. Was she thinking about her marriage to granddaddy, her life, her lost loves, sex, her gifts, her regrets, her mortality, what she was going to cook for supper? Was she in her relentless pursuit to walk closer to Jesus? Was she thinking about the two sons she buried or the seven daughters who tag teamed one another as her friend, then foe? Was she thinking about what she could have done or been or seen if not shackled to family, farm and faith? Was she feeling gratitude for a green thumb and good crop and fine existence? Or maybe she was just enjoying the moment in her yard, being alone in the darkness with comfort-haints of her own.
Perhaps this would read better if there were something profound to deliver in my table night ponderings over life, liberty and the pursuit of peace. Perhaps if I were strategizing through a problem or sweat-birthing an epiphany and could relay an epic revelation while flanked by Casper the friendly poltergeist, this would be louder with emotion and meaning. In the stillness, I didn’t get online to shop or engage in social media. I didn’t turn on the light or the radio. I didn’t meditate or write or practice yoga. I channeled the memory of my granny, Myrtle Jane Needham Barber, dead over thirty years and something shifted as spirit and I sat in the calm, noting the division of my cells and the beating of my heart. Aware of what it’s like to be alive, woke, as they say, in the middle of the night on the 5th of July.
It was the 5th of July. I am the 5th of July. We are kin.
I love this ! What is granny thinking about ?
It never occurred to me to ask this question when she was alive, and I regret it.