Sleeping With Dogs

It is exactly 3 a.m., Sunday morning, January 22, 2023.  Coco just leapt out of bed to deal with some intruder in the yard or on the terrace and came back to bed with hiccups. Zoe, who is too little to leap back up on the bed under her own power, is crying to be boosted up for the second time in 15 minutes, having barely settled herself before following along in her sister’s panic.

I, on the other hand, had just settled into a comfortable position on the small section of bed I’d claimed from the dogs and started the first few steps into my dreamworld when a possum or cat or skunk or mouse or squirrel or the ghost of some former possum or cat or skunk or mouse or squirrel  had deigned to enter the dogs’ domain.

Now all is right in the world and the dogs have settled. I, on the other hand, have again entered the addictive realm of the internet and here I am again, doing that tapdance of fingers on the keys. As though I don’t have enough file cabinets, boxes and folders and blog entries full of words.  What is going to happen to all these words when I die? And why is it even important to me what happens to them? In the world of words, they are also-rans. No one will hear in my words much that they have not heard before. But they are the story of my life, my world, and although it is inevitable that I will vanish, I don’t want them to. My art has gone out into the world and perhaps will continue to once I have left it in the hands of its inheritors, but my words will float back into that great lexicon of the universe to perhaps be given birth in the minds of some future soul who will sort them into a different order and make them their own.

3:14. Lights out, settled again…..and Zoe is off again, high-pitched barks LOUDLY punctuating the night air as she leaps from the bed in an arc, landing on the floor and out the gap between the security bars on the door to search out some other intruder. Once again, I leave my bed to cajole her to come back to bed.  When she finally complies, I shut the glass slider so her next protestations will at least be muffled from the neighbors. She settles herself on my lap which means I am again the prisoner  that I had been previous to rolling Coco off my lap and assuming a more comfortable position. I’ll awaken with a backache from being frozen into one position for the rest of the night, but finallly all seems to be settled. Sleeping with dogs––a bit like living with a newborn. Or two newborns. But the alternative is utter seclusion which can bring other night terrors and certainly different thoughts before finally, blessedly, falling to sleep.