Tag: sleep

I can’t sleep, and the library

sumacandmilkweedLeave a comment
post-sunset sky, Lomochrome Turquoise film, Mamiya C220

I don’t know if it’s excitement to be done with school or nervousness to be done with school (that “what’s next” I just wrote about). Or the pile of books I plan to read and am genuinely giddy about (I already tore through two books over the last four days!). Or an upcoming project I’ve been asked to edit (I am honored, both professionally and personally). Or that when I drove back to the cottage yesterday after being away for a few days, I saw a farmstand with a sign for peaches. Already! Or that I plan to take a break from work one morning this week to pick blueberries at the farm from which I’ve been picking blueberries almost my entire life.

I was at home in the city for the weekend, and I couldn’t sleep there. The bedroom was too warm, the dog nextdoor barked on and off throughout the night from a room below my bedroom window just off their driveway (he doesn’t normally bark throughout the night). And our little city was even quieter than normal—the usual revving engines late into the night was oddly not happening. But I couldn’t sleep last night once I arrived here at the cottage, either, where I usually sleep like a champ, and I can find no obvious reason for that.

The paper I’ve dedicated the last 13 weeks (mainly, but I’ve been thinking about it since I began this masters program) of my life to is about 98% done. I have some finishing touches, a final review, and I plan to turn it in before the end of the week. I’m wondering if once I submit it, that’s when I’ll sleep? We’ll see.

I also reinstated my library card over the weekend. This is A Big Deal, to me, anyway. I grew up going to the library with my mom at least twice a week. She got a break from my brother and I there, sending us off to the kids’ section while she dove into her own books. We went home with armloads of books between us. We were voracious, and the library was our respite from being always stretched thin, money-wise. Unlike at stores, we could get whatever we wanted there, at least up to the limit of what we were allowed to check out at one time. I felt rich walking the three blocks home with my stash of books—all mine.

So of course I took our kids to the library in the city we raised them in, a few miles away from my family home. My kids loved the children’s section with its carpeted claw-foot bathtub for cozy reading. It seems to be less quiet than my hometown library, and it is in a gorgeous historical house. We couldn’t quite walk there when my kids were little, but just after our oldest bumped into double digit ages we moved into a house just a few blocks away from the library, and I became a regular again. Life was busy, though, and my record for returning books on time got mighty shaky, until some years ago I borrowed some books on CD, somehow lost one of the CDs, and found myself too ashamed to go back.

It was easy to buy books online by that point, or at used book stores when I came across them, or by e-reader, so that’s what I did. But I’m trying to be a conscientious consumer these days, and, well, I decided to be brave and go back to the library and see if they would reinstate my card. I have to say, of all the places where one should expect kindness and understanding, a library might top that list. I was (very nicely) reinstated, and instead of walking out with an armful of books I might be lousy about returning on time, I left with directions on how to set up my old e-reader to borrow books. Voila! And maybe this winter when I am in the city more I’ll be brave again and borrow physical books (and set up copious reminders to get them back on time).

How do you pick a side?*

sumacandmilkweed4 Comments

It’s pouring here, has been since early this morning.

I’m restless, too busy–my brain won’t quiet. I barely finish a thought when the next one comes barging in, shoving the one before it into the swamp-marsh of things in my head that bubble and are forgotten.

I have a lot of questions rumbling around in my head. I often wonder if it’s too many questions, but this is the way my brain works and who am I to argue that? And if you know me personally, you might know that I ask a lot of questions. I want to know how people work.

And the question that woke me up at 3 a.m., before the rain started, when the dog had 90 percent of my bed space and the world was so quiet outside that I was nearly convinced that me and the dog and the cottage were the only existing things on earth, was this:

What side of the bed do you sleep on? And why?

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Which then led to these questions:

  • Do you change the side of the bed you sleep on when you sleep somewhere else, or when you move?
  • Is your choice dependent upon bed placement, or size or shape of room?
  • What about geographical placement (like, do you need be on the northernmost side of the bed)?
  • Do you let other people (or pets) influence your side-of-bed choice?
  • Is your choice influenced by needing to be close to or farther away from a door or window?
  • Do you not even choose a side, but sleep in the middle (understandable for a twin bed, but anything bigger and middle sleeping just seems unfathomable to me)?
  • Is it weird that I am even pondering these questions?
  • I mean, why do I need to know how other people sleep?
  • Should there even be hyphens in the phrase “side-of-bed choice”?
  • Wait, do I really want to be questioning hyphen use in the middle of the night?

And so it went for a good half hour longer, pondering beds and sides and pillows (fat and thick? or flat and thin?) and the ultimate question of why dogs in beds, even tiny dogs, seem to expand to take up so much more space than it seems they should.

Maybe that’s a question for another sleepless middle of the night. Dog expansion.

*Oh. You thought I was going to write about the election? Sorry to disappoint.