As you’ve already heard me whinge, it’s been a bad couple of weeks for sleep around here. Some insomnia-triggers I bet are familiar in your household, too:
Coronavirus health alerts. Oh great, now every time I eat a dodgy taco, I can worry about COVID-19. To say nothing of the after-effects if one actually has had COVID-19.
Armed and dangerous coronavirus-related idiocy. I already despaired of my ability to convince non-believers that testing and face-masks can help. But I did love-love-love this snappy comeback from a Guardian columnist, and will use it myself if I know I have a safe route out of the parking lot:
In the early weeks of the pandemic, I left the house on a weekly trip for groceries. In gloves and a mask, I crossed the parking lot and heard a male voice growl at me from the cab of a truck: “This ain’t Mars.”
“I’m trying not to get any stupid on me,” I said over my shoulder. “Look at you, you’ve got it all over yourself.”
Bubonic plague. Thanks heavens this is in Outer Mongolia… which actually isn’t a million miles from Wuhan, now I look at a map. Oh dear.
So why does this post’s title sound all Mary Poppins or “Wind in the Willows”?
Waking up smiling
Because, sometimes, the sleep gods adjudicate in our favor.
I had been listening to a lovely recording of Brian Eno’s Discreet Music (performed by the ensemble Contact) as I fell asleep, so credit where credit is due for what followed. As dawn approached — perhaps around 5 o’clock in the morning — I had a lovely dream that Timothy had come to help me design a gallery to house the photographs in “40 Ways.”
Timothy looked at the proof copy of the book, only recently arrived. Then we talked, we moved furniture about to better display a photograph, curled up on a couch in front of the fireplace. He touched my hand, and I hopefully opened one eye to look for him…
Instead, I saw no cats were in fussbudget mode, and drifted back to sleep.
I next found myself at Arvon, at Totleigh Barton, for a spring reunion of the memoirists I met last December. We gathered around the big dining table, poured some wine and drifted out to the apple orchard; all the while, I looked for good friends who had been absent indoors. When I saw them walking through the meadow grass, my heart leapt up, and I called out that now we could decide what to do next.
One group wanted to listen to a choir singing Faure’s Requiem at the village’s medieval church. Another wanted to go off to see the Butterfly Garden in the Cotswolds. Both sounded wonderful, healing, uplifting (in the case of the butterflies, literally). Joyously, I pointed to the oversize, horse-drawn carriage suddenly waiting for us, and cried, “It’s all perfect! We can go in style to the singing butterflies.”
And so we apparently did, as I woke up before the alarm went off for the first time in three months.