August Goodbye

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.

     Faith Baldwin in August of

       Face Toward the Spring     

I used to flip the calendar page from August to September dancing a jig, or my version of it.

Since last August I've learned that my favorite months of October and November can bring heartbreak, just when you expected life to be the most wonderful.

This is the last day of August. We will probably be on into September before I'm back here again. 

I wish you well, I wish myself and RH well. I wish a last day of August well lived to you and a Labor Day weekend full of exactly what your heart, soul and body need. 

Our daughter gives me the pages for a new year's calendar for Christmas each year, each page an artistic triumph--although August's Japanese beetle this year only made me think of holes chewed in roses. I love this calendar that sits on a little easel beside my bed and save all of them, something else for my children to throw away someday.

But my kitchen calendar is one I jot down everything on that I need to remember, and then I need to remember to look at it. This year's art is by Kevin Dodds and I revel in the country scenes. 

Goodbye August. You've taught me some important things this year, things that may leave an imprint on me, some things I would not have chosen to be taught at the time.

But "time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations."

                                    

Friends

Usually when I type a quote on Across the Way I put it in italics. With the following quote, I won't do that as italics can be more difficult to read and I want to make this as easy to read as possible because it meant a lot to me when I read it. Why? Because it reminded me of you, of me and you, my readers, my friends. It was written by Faith Baldwin:

"I have a friend whose ways are other than mine; 

we have our own likes, dislikes, prejudices and enthusiasms.

I like my steak rare, she prefers hers well done, so each considers the other

in this unimportant respect a barbarian.

I stay up late, she goes to bed early;

I'm crazy about crossword puzzles, she couldn't care less about them.

We differ about some books, plays, television productions, colors and fashion.

Sometimes, of course, we agree.

It's all trivial enough and we recognize our similarity,

one to the other--and to other people.

Differences make each of us himself, but likenesses made us part of a far larger world.

My friend and I have known anxieties, sorrows, and suffering;

we are often insecure and troubled.

We look upon the changing face of nature and may see different aspects of it,

but we share, as we look.

We can laugh or cry together and recognize the essential needs we also share.

So the difference makes us individuals, but the likeness makes us sisters."

Faith Baldwin in Evening Star

As I read this I immediately thought of my blogging friends, both those who also blog and those who don't but who I hear from through comments or email. What Faith Baldwin has written about her friend is also true, I think, or it should be, of those I communicate with in this wonderful electronic friendship. Naturally, it is easy and comfortable to have friends who are similar to me. You are important to me. But it is also important to me to have friends who delight me with your differences. 

It was also Faith Baldwin who wrote, "It is said that we don't make our friends, that we simply recognize them."

Isn't that an exciting sentence! I hope I can keep my eyes open and recognize friends that I meet through Across the Way or through those blogs I visit or through private emails like those I have had from a dear Oklahoma friend. I can't help but believe that there are even readers who I've never met who recognize me as their friend. I send out a warm hello to you. I hope you're doing well and that life is kind to you.

This picture is of a vintage Hallmark card that I found at Goodwill. It is my bookmark in the book quoted from above, Faith Baldwin's Evening Star. I love it and I hope you will too. It is my little gift to you today, my friend.

"Stalking Sleep"

"It has been some time since I have gone to bed and slept long and well...

I have found myself repeatedly stalking sleep--

and catching it only in snatches."

Faith Baldwin

I have tried to accept what I have been unable to change. I bless the rare nights when I fall asleep before midnight and try not to let it upset me when I cannot. Usually I get up rather than lying there until I can't stand the touch of the mattress on my bones any longer. I iron or something quiet so I don't wake my husband and disturb the sleep that he stalks as well. Or I get up and write, not on my computer but with a pencil and yellow legal pad.

The middle of the night can be conducive to an easy stream-of-consciousness writing. Have you ever noticed that? I like these elegant lines by Robert Shallor Holmes. I jotted them down so many years ago that I have forgotten whether the "Author" he refers to means God, which can also make perfect sense here, or as I am taking it to mean an actual "author", a writer, perhaps even a blogger. Regardless, I like to think that his "velvet of the night" will entice forth my own middle of the night talent:

The Author's Rendezvous

    When the silences are sealed

 By the velvet of the night...

Robert Shallor Holmes

(Not that much of what I've written in the "velvet of the night" is ever any good when read by light of day, more's the pity!)

I'm not talking about missing a little sleep now and then or a night here and there tossing and turning. Or of the odd early morning when a bathroom trip means the end of that night's sleep. I'm talking about chronic insomnia and I've tried all the magazine tips to no avail. 

My room is dark, quiet, and cool. There is no television or computer in my bedroom and no desk work piled up in a corner. There are no longer any pets in my bed to wake me up needing to go outside and potty now that my sweet Penelope is no longer with us. I've tried setting my alarm for seven every morning, getting up and staying up for five days in a row. Going outside in the sunlight in the morning to reset my melatonin. Buying a new mattress and new pillows. Not having caffeine after breakfast. Not eating chocolate. Eating a snack at bedtime. Not eating anything near bedtime. Going to bed tired physically. Going to bed rested. Afternoon nap. No nap. Nothing works. 

I find that the best sleep I get is from about 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. Sleeping to 9 a.m. makes me feel that I've been reborn--but then it is more difficult to get to sleep that night. I've always loved the mornings, always been a cheerful morning person. I miss that so much and I miss not accomplishing all that I used to be able to in the morning. Sometimes I think I should accept going to sleep around 1 or 1:30 a.m. as the new norm and sleep until 9. Is there an age a person has to reach before they can do this without feeling slothful?

Oh, this all seems so embarrassing, so unseemly. It goes against what I believe in, that admonition of Schopenhauer: "Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life." I believe that. That principle was drilled into my sisters and me by our father, by example if nothing else. Our mother's principle was more on the lines of this cute paraphrase by Dee Hardie: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes your house neater than otherwise!"

My whole upbringing makes the following three words sound to me as irritating as chalk squeaking on an old-fashioned blackboard:

I have insomnia.

Should I just accept stalking sleep? Is there any help? Any non-pharmaceutical help?

"Insomnia does not consist in waking up for a few minutes in the middle of the night,

reading a chapter of a book and then dozing off again.

It means getting out of bed in desperation, at one or two in the morning,

dressing and coming downstairs, and wandering about an empty house

till dawn finds you with aching eyes and a splitting head.

After a week or so of this you neither feel nor look very pretty."

Beverley Nichols in All I Could Never Be