Be Here, Now

6/22/2016

The Lay of the Land

By Lyn Messersmith

Be Here, Now

            Maggie came up off the bed with a start, barking at the top of her lungs. I crawled out and opened the door so she could protect us from the owl that lives in a tree near the bedroom and the coyotes across the meadow. We’re all used to their nighttime serenades, but occasionally Mags decides to reassure us that she’s at the top of her watchdog game. One circle around the house usually proves her point, so we can all fall back to dreamland.

Until the first sign of daylight, when the birds begin to wake up. Maggie sleeps through that, but I don’t. I have trouble going to sleep this time of year too. The scent of damp dirt from my evening flower watering drifts in the window, and there are fireflies all over the yard. I’m transported back to childhood days when we sat on the lawn to cool off after supper, while I caught them in a Mason jar. Later, I was lulled to sleep with the soft song of a windmill out by the barn.

When we visited my grandparents in Omaha, I lay awake listening to cars stopping briefly at the dead end street on the corner by their house; hearing footsteps on the pavement as someone passed, and wondered where all those people could be going when it was past bedtime. Those were the days when air conditioning was only for department stores, or offices downtown. While adults hovered near fans in the house, I sat on the newly cut lawn breathing deeply and pretending I was in the hayfields at home.

Neither of my homes has air conditioning, and it has to get pretty warm outside before I can be convinced to shut the house up against heat. Perhaps that mindset goes back to childhood when I fought going to sleep for fear of missing something.  Few folks realize how much they miss with windows shut, but I suppose when the focus is always on a screen of some kind, the idea of a whole world out there is foreign.

We put new windows in the house at Bruce’s place when we moved in. All of the sales people who came out to convince us of the superiority of their product mentioned the fact that our home would be quieter. “You won’t hear a thing out there,” was the usual comment, and we couldn’t convince them that we wanted to hear the meadow larks, cattle bawling, wind in the treetops, and someone driving into the yard.

I’m summer’s child, and that season is pretty short in the Sandhills. But I carry a jacket all summer to wear in restaurants, waiting rooms, and even at social events in people’s homes, so I’m pretty happy when the celebration is held on the deck or in the park.

Most of us live in a bubble, conscious only of what is right in front of us, because we have shut out the rest of our surroundings. I’m pretty ok with that when it snowing and ten below zero, but for now, could we please open a window?

           

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