Sleeping Out

Yesterday I decided I needed to sleep outside. I’ve had a tent set up in the woods by the pond for the last two weeks, since Cedar and I camped out one night. It’s survived a couple of wind and rain storms, and it seemed silly not to use it after it had been out through all that.

Camping is wonderful, even when the weather is bad, which it pretty much always is when Bruce and I camp. (I will not tell our honeymoon story here, but to say the weather went to extremes to test our marriage is not exaggerating.) Camping does not let me think about anything from my regular, stressful life. Even in the best weather I’m consumed by setting up the tent, gathering firewood, making a fire, cooking food, cleaning dishes, hanging a bear bag, putting out the fire.… Sometimes there are even mountains to climb or lakes or streams to paddle, but for me they are beside the point. Camping is the point. It occupies my entire mind as well as my body, letting in no worries about work or home. And it fills me with a sense of self-sufficiency, so I feel like no matter what does happen back home, I can handle it.

Last night, after dinner at the table with Cedar and Bruce and after listening to chapter 18 of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on CD, I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, put on my PJs and walked down the hill to the tent. At first I only heard one frog, and then another, but not the chorus of peeps and trills that had sung us to sleep two weeks ago. (Summer, where have you gone?) These frogs had rough voices, and occasionally they rolled their voices in their throats, like they were trying to purr, before going back to their “Kung” sound. (I don’t know how anyone got the idea that frogs say “ribbet”. The frogs around here say a lot of things, but that isn’t one of them.) In the light of my headlamp, a little moth fluttered up and down the screen door of the tent, glowing like a tiny fairy.

When I clicked off the light, the darkness was almost total, buoying me in the stillness of the night. I was not really camping, about 150 feet from the house, but a swath of trees stood between me and my life. I was alone in the woods with a couple of frogs, and even though I could hear our new neighbors a quarter mile up the road shrieking and splashing in their pool and I could hear a car making its way up the road and past me, it was still good to be out. It was enough, and it was even better when a sprinkle of rain fell and the neighbors went inside.