Last week I got to reread “The Dance” as it was republished and this sent me on a reading spree of old essays. There is one called “In the Still of the Night” that tries to illustrate the some “night” moments–moments I revisit in the middle of the night but also moments that happened on nights I won’t forget.
This is the last vignette in the essay and I love it. Not only because it reminds me of one of my favorite places on earth but also because I think it is well-written. The phrase “sun-bleached hay and thickening pond water” is objectively the perfect way to describe the summer night air in Idaho. And I got to write it!
I don’t expect you to love this paragraph like I do. That’s too much to expect, I know. But maybe you’ll think it’s sweet. Or at the very least, you’ll know somewhere in time and space there is a little girl looking out a night window and she is very, very happy.
Before I crawl into bed, I like to sit at the open window of my bedroom upstairs—the one that faces West. The horizon is still a little blue from where the sun set not long ago. But the sky is darkening quickly and stars begin to dot the blackness. The wind blows haphazardly through the big poplars—sometimes with force, mostly with a soft push and pull on the leaves. It reminds me of waves rolling in although at that time I had never seen the ocean. My contact lens are out so my eyes can relax into the fuzzy images of the barn, the arena lights, the fences, the bulk of the trees. I like to breath in the night air—it’s moist and warm with just a hint of chill of night. It smells like sun-bleached hay and thickening pond water. And this, this is my favorite part: the metronome of the pipe sprinklers. As the wind is erratic and rolling, they are steady and small. Tick, tick, tick, tick. They are the passing of time and the rightness of the world. They are order in chaotic night. They are saying, “Time for sleep. Time for sleep. Stop your thinking. Go to sleep.”
Call Me Mandy 