Darkness Falls…

“Why are your lights off?” My father asked when he called around 10pm. “I’m just checking on you.”

“I took my nightly meds, felt dizzy, and went to bed to listen to the radio,” I replied.

“Well, it’s not like you to not be up this time of the night,” He said. “It just worries me. You keep weird hours when you are drinking.”

The night before he was worried because I stayed up too late. I just can't win. I assured Dad that nothing was wrong and we got off the phone finally after some small talk. He sounded like he had a rough day and seemed so tired. He now thinks that I should not go up to Birmingham for the birth of my sister’s baby. He feels it will be too much on me and that I will get off kilter. I wish he would just let me decide such things for myself.

I lay in the bed for the longest time after that listening to that far flung radio station out of New Orleans. Midnight rolled around and Coast to Coast AM came on followed by discussions of aliens and UFOs. It always makes me smile and amuses me so much when people call in and pontificate so seriously about something not real and imagined. Humans are such interesting creatures.

Half in and out of sleep, I laid there in the dark until Maggie started to bark up a storm. It scared the shit out of me and my heart started to race. I pulled on some shorts and walked to the back door to look outside to my backyard alit by the lone fluorescent glow of my porch light. A lone possum went ambling across the yard, stopped, and turned to look my way with glowing green eyes.

“Hush girl,” I told Maggie. “It is just a possum and harmless.”

That didn’t daunt Maggie though. It took a good thirty minutes to calm her down. I call her my Stone Age alarm system; probably better than anything you could ever buy from Brinks. I finally got Maggie calmed down and curled back up in the bed with me. She spends the longest time primping herself which is one of our nightly rituals she undergoes. I finally drifted off to blissful sleep after Maggie had settled down.

3am rolled around with me wide awake. I blearily looked at my bedside alarm clock in horror to find I had another long early morning ahead of me. One of my deepest desires and wishes these days is to get a full, good night’s sleep that so eludes me these days. It seems I am always up well before the crack of dawn.

Well, let me go get some coffee started while I listen to the radio and wait for dawn to arrive. I have just four hours to go until that glorious sun shines through my windows. Good day.