Northern Lights

  I awoke in the middle of the night tonight, the two cats vying for the position nearest my heart. My doctor says when you can’t sleep not to lay there and toss and turn so I decided to get up. I fixed myself a cup of hot tea and sat in my little writing room by candlelight. The writing muse has begun to spin tales in my head again, beckoning me to get back to the book I started writing this time last year before my life fell apart with a move of a mere forty miles that seems like four hundred.

It’s 3:30 AM and my husband woke me a few hours earlier to tell me of a dream he had involving my boss and a secret door near the airport. As hubby stepped through the door, he saw space ships hovering in the sky above him. He became afraid and fell to the ground where he began to frantically cover himself with mud in an attempt to hide from the Aliens. Thank heavens (pun intended) he woke up before he was abducted or fell victim to one of their sick scientific experiments. In the physical realm, I know he’s still alive and well in the next room, lying in the safety of our bed hooked up to his C-Pap machine because I just heard him passing gas.

And no, it was not through his mouth!

Anyway, I am sure there is something highly "symbolic" about covering one’s self with mud ... if I could JUST find that darned dream interpretation book that is still packed up somewhere! My husband, he’s HIDING something from me, I am sure of it, although it's more likely a newly purchased antique, than a lover. 

As I walked through the darkness into the kitchen, I glanced out the back French doors, which overlook a sweet little brick terrace and arbor that holds the promise of a huge expanse of intoxicating Jasmine in the spring. I noticed the sky glowed orange as it towered over the big old Magnolia and electrical lines that make up my backyard in the city. Hoping for a view of the Aurora Borealis, the famed Northern Lights, I ventured out the front door instead which gives me a better of view of  true “North”, but even the largest solar storm in the last fifty years was no match for the lights of the city.

Maybe it’s the Cosmos that has us all discombobulated, the CATS included…

I started reading a book a few nights ago given to me for Christmas by my dear niece and nephew called Writers Dreaming, a collection of short essays from a wide and various assortment of writers from Isabelle Allende to Steven King, about their dream lives and how it affects their writing. It’s strange- after so long without dreaming , I have begun to dream again. Unfortunately, all my dreams seem induced by stress, like that old recurring one where it’s the end of the semester and I suddenly remember that I had forgot to attend one of my classes, or I am fgrantically running through amaze of halls in the school, looking for my classroom but cannot find it. In my latest dreams, there has been no flying, no giants, not a single alien- just odd experiences like my husband telling me he ’s found a cool little house somewhere and has decided we need to move again.

Again… Talk about NIGHTMARES!!!

ARGHHHHHHHHHHH!

Still, after the “move“, it is our daily life as much as our night life that seems suspended somewhere between reality and dreams. I visited a strange old lady down the street, Mrs. Rutgers on Christmas Day, dropping off a card and some homemade cookies for fear she was spending the holiday alone. And she was. If I were a child, I would have been afraid of her, thinking her a witch of some sort, with her crazy eyes darting around every which direction, her grey hair long and stringy and the way she spoke  of our old neighborhood with its big elm trees and overgrown greenways as a “Fairyland”. Still, that day when she opened the door the mere 12 inches or so to allow me to hand her the gifts, I encountered a foul stench unlike anything I had ever smelled before. the smell  sent me reeling from her porch, gasping for air. She waved to my husband and I a few days later as we were walking the dogs, but the next day she was found dead. I am told by the neighborhood gossips that she was actually from a wealthy family who kept her- an eccentric relative-  here in her childhood home. I was also told that regarding her death, there was rumors of foul-play, or more likely suicide. This makes me really sad...

I have befriended another elderly gentleman in the neighborhood, now in his nineties, a fascinating man: a former sports writer for the Atlanta Constitution, a Georgia Book of the Year nominee, and a man whose ethnic lineage spins yarns like an Arabic Three Musketeers and a philosopher for a father educated with Kahlil Gilbran. He has invited us for a Super Bowl Party, of which I know nothing about but the commercials. Still, I know I will enjoy his company along with the hot wings!

Then, there was yet another encounter with our house’s deceased matriarch and landlord, Miss Toudie. A few days after Christmas, my husband went for a walk in a beautiful old city cemetery near the house, Green Hill Cemetery. The cemetery is so large it is practically a city unto itself. Beautiful monuments sit peacefully beneath the tree-lined paths and rise and fall with the undulating hills. Many of the city’s founders and famous people are buried here. Still, as my husband went for one of his first of many walks in the graveyard, it chilled him to the bone that he was immediately  “led” to a obscure spot at the far edge of the cemetery where Miss Toudie and her husband lay buried together. Perry and I both feel Miss Toudie was and IS a bit of a practical jokester, and I imagine it gave her quite a chuckle to see the expression on his face!

“She just wanted to wish you “Merry Christmas””, I chided.

Well, it is now 6 AM, probably too late to go back to sleep. although my recently exhausting work schedule has encouraged me to sleep later and later each morning… Another busy day awaits me. But TGIF!!! My husband is awake now, milling about the house, popping multiple bags of my single serve popcorn actually, (yes at 6 AM to take to his High School Art Students.) The sky has yet to shift from orange to blue or will it be grey today?

Sleep or not, I think I’m going back to bed… just for a FEW minutes.