Just Another Saturday Night

It's late, late now, and the tree frogs and the night insects are singing.  The attic fan is finally pulling the last of the almost 90 degree temperature out of the house since I resolutely refuse to turn the air conditioner on before the middle of April, and the cool damp night air of a Mississippi spring is flowing in through all the screens of open windows, open doors.  I can hear the windchimes on the front porch clattering together, but other than these soft night sounds, there is no noise.

It's just another country Saturday night.  A car will briefly break the darkness with headlights every now and again as it passes, a temporary trespasser on all this solitude, but the night slides back together behind its passage like it never was there, its brief smudge of luminescence quickly devoured.  This aloneness is not uncomfortable.  It is not an isolation but a sense of being in one's own space.

It's a good night for reading or thinking, for remembering, and tonight my mind is dancing lightly across the past and into the future.  It's making the silliest and most improbable plans, confections with no basis in reality at all. These plans stir up longings and desires, make me take out maps and look up places online that I'd like to be, make me see myself with different light spilling over my face, different views out my windows.  Of course, Thoreau said, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."  However, that's the part that's giving me problems.  I can spin dreams for days.  I can make the most fantastic plans, see the most amazing futures.  When it comes time to begin attaching those castles to the ground though, that is where I lose my way. 

It's also apparently a good night for walking down the hallways of my mind and peering into old storage that I am more comfortable leaving the doors of locked tight and left alone, though.  And, so, too, this night also makes me sit and think of what is gone, what I had and wasted, what was never mine at all....  We recently read "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" by Herrick in my senior classes, and the last two lines, "For having lost but once your prime/ You may forever tarry," keep circling in my head like the mocking call of circling birds of prey.  My roses have faded.  I have not seized my day.  Herrick would be shaking his semi-priestly head at me, saddened by all the opportunities I've let go by.  But if I did not love them......

It's time to get up from here and take the freshly aired and sunned feather mattress and put it back on my bed, to take the clean sheets and reassemble my nest and get in it, perhaps even to take a cool shower to make sure all the heat of the day is gone before I climb in since sleeping hot will ensure the bad dreams I suspect are lurking at the corners of my mind will become a reality.  Whenever so much of what I desire and what I regret are in my head like this, I dream horrible things.

It is hard to be content sometimes.  I try to be.  I try very hard to be content with what I have, the blessings that I have at this moment here in this place.  Sometimes, though, I just feel like going out under the dark of the moon and throwing my arms up to the sky and screaming.  I don't know what that childish act would accomplish.  Nothing, probably, other than frightening the white tailed deer who sneak into the back yard and graze.  At least nobody would call the cops.  There are, after all, no neighbors near to be concerned by the sound of silly venting in the pasture edge....

It's just another Saturday night here in rural Mississippi.  The frogs are singing.  The breeze stirs the curtains gently.  My mind eddies and tumbles like fast-moving water over mostly submerged rocks.  This is what happens when there's nothing to distract me from myself.  I suppose what I need more than anything else here is something to save me from myself, then.  I wonder if anything ever will.