The Effects Of A Sleepless Night, Part One

The rumbling did indeed come through -- and again and again and again. The power went out early and after I gammoned Christian in a candlelight backgammon match we went to bed. (To be clear, he beat me in the following match, but I really have to insist we all just focus on my gammoning him. A first for me! And about the third time I've beat him in two years of play.)

So all is well on our quiet Vermont farm. We are all tucked away by ten thirty, the heat of the day blown away by the cool storm winds.

Until 2. I woke up and could not get back to sleep. Soon Christian woke up. The power was back on, so that was good. We heard heavy footfalls downstairs and the rattle of the clothes dryer. Christian looked at me and said
"is my dad wearing shoes?"
and I looked at him and said
"is he doing laundry?"

Sal does not have a soft walk. He could never, ever sneak up on someone. But he almost never walks around in shoes at night. Well, he almost never walks around at night.

Then we heard the front door open, followed by steady foot falls. The outdoor lights were on, triggered by action (Christian hates them so, they make it seem like a compound). We crept to the window and saw my father in law walking lengths of the porch, carrying a flashlight. We looked at each other.

"is he sleepwalking?"
"nuts to that, is he doing laps?"

Christian went down to make sure he was okay. I went to check on the cats because that is the sort of thing that I do. On sleepless nights it becomes very important to me that they have fresh water. Sal was also having a sleepless night, I was told, and was hoping that some walking on the porch would help. We wished him well and went back to our room.

We tried every trick in the book:
I drank some warm milk
we watched an episode of nip/tuck on netflix
we closed our eyes for ten minutes, focusing on being relaxed
he read to me, something that usually puts me to sleep. (But I'd like to say here that I love being read to. Not children's books, obviously, but books we are interested in and are easy to read. Currently we are reading "A Death In Belmont" by Sebastian Junger.)
I read to him.

This last one put him to sleep. I stayed awake up 5 or so. I know that when you have sleeplessness you should not allow yourself to nap so your body will sleep at night and not in the middle of the afternoon. That's going to be a tough one today.

I'm sure I will have some moments of empty-headedness today. I will report back on them.