This has been a summer of setting and realizing goals large and small, old and new. One of the old small goals was to sleep outdoors on the deck of my dad's cottage on Keats Island in Howe Sound. This seems like a simple enough goal but I have not been able to achieve it for several years. I blame Mark mostly because when we go to Keats together he's not super keen on sleeping outside and I never feel like sleeping out by myself if he is in close proximity to me. Sleeping together, because we don't live together, is one of the sweet pleasures of the time we do spend with each other. But this week found me up at Keats without Mark, so I grabbed the opportunity to sleep outside. With Pearl safely installed in dad's room with Luna sleeping at her feet and my very competent sister in the next room I went out and made my bed under the eaves on the daybed.
I'd like to say the experience was divine but it wasn't entirely. It was a hot still night, there were mosquitoes so I had to keep my sheet over my head which made stargazing a bit tricky. I was a little nervous about being attacked, or worse licked, by rogue Raccoons who only two nights earlier had kept my sister awake as they broke into the old time food safe to steal some dogfood that was stored there. I woke up around 2:30 because I was dying to pee which I did at the edge of the deck and then tossed and turned dodging dive bombing mosquitoes until the recently relentless sun woke me up at 5:30 or so.
Strangely though, when I woke up in the morning I felt exceptionally good. Not just because I had fallen asleep listening to the water lap along the beach or because the stars shone brightly in the summer night sky. I felt good because I had finally achieved this small thing that I had wanted to do since my dad, many years ago, slept on an older version of the this same deck with his star chart and flashlight, trying to figure out his position in the universe.
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