I’ve been sleeping with the windows open

I have been sleeping with the windows open. Four and a half decades ago, we slept in a blue tent while we built our house, an old canvas tent given to us by my father, and set up on a plywood platform to keep us off the ground. At night we’d hear loons down on Sakinaw Lake, their long lonely yearning filling the darkness. Once we heard a cougar scream quite near and the dog, sleeping under the tarp spread over the tent and a small area we used for cooking, tried to dig herself under the platform. The membrane between us and everything else in the world around us was almost as thin as air.

The older I get, the more I miss those days. They weren’t easy, exactly. We worked hard, digging holes for the footings, mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow with water lugged up from Ruby Lake in 5 gallon barrels, framing walls, lifting them into place. We had a baby. I bathed him a metal bowl on the table John built using logs for the legs and bracing and lengths of shiplap for the surface. When he grew a little bigger, I bought a plastic baby bathtub, which came in handy when we went down to Ruby Lake after a hot day’s work to rinse off and swim; we’d put the baby in the bathtub filled with lake water and he’d cool off too.

I miss those days. In a closed house, you don’t hear the loons. You don’t hear the owls. Maybe you’d rather not hear a cougar but you wouldn’t have the choice with the windows closed. What you hear is the news, which is almost never good.

Last night, the windows were open. When I got up to put the cat out at 1:30 a.m., I heard loons, the long yearning and the crazy laugh. I heard something else rustling in the eaves. A weasel maybe? When I returned to bed, I thought about the deck I am readying for summer: I’ve planted sweetpeas, fertilized the tubs of roses and oriental lilies, arranged pots of rosemary at the foot of the Desert King fig. The sweet yellow daylilies are already in bud. Today we’ll put out the round table, the one where we drink our coffee after our morning swims.

I miss the days of sleeping with only a thin membrane of canvas between me and the night. I miss the wildness of our land, before the driveway, before the house, before the gardens, the woodshed, the greenhouse, the climbing wisterias and their heavenly scent. I miss those days but last night the window was open and I heard the loons, an owl, something rustling in the eaves. In a month the deer will pass with their young by the copper beech where my parents’ ashes are scattered. I’ll remember to stand at the edge of the woods and look back, back to where our house sits in its drapery of vines.

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere
At once.

Note: the lines of verse are Gary Snyder’s, from “As For Poets”

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