Dear Life

birds began to stir, and then to sing—as if each of them had thought of it separately, up there in the trees. They woke far earlier than I would have thought possible. But soon after those earliest starting songs, there got to be a little whitening in the sky. And suddenly I would be overwhelmed with sleepiness. I went back into the house, where there was suddenly darkness everywhere, and I very properly, carefully, silently, set the tilted chair under the doorknob, and went upstairs without a sound, managing doors and steps with the caution necessary, although I seemed already half asleep. I fell into my pillow, and I woke late—late in our house being around eight o’clock.
    I would remember everything then, but it was so absurd—the bad part of it indeed was so absurd—that I could get rid of it fairly easily. My brother and sister had gone off to their classes in the public school, but their dishes were still on the table, a few bits of puffed rice floating in the excess milk.
    Absurd.
    When my sister got home from school we would swing in the hammock, one of us at either end.
    It was in that hammock that I spent much of the days, which possibly accounted for my not getting to sleep at night. And since I did not speak of my night difficulties, nobody came up with the simple information that I’d be better off getting more action during the day.
    My troubles returned with the night, of course. The demons got hold of me again. I knew enough soon to get up and out of my bunk without any pretending that things would get better and that I would in fact go to sleep if I just tried hard enough. I made my way as carefully out of the house as I had done before. I became able to find my way around more easily; even the inside of the rooms became more visible to me and yet more strange. I could make out the tongue-in-groove kitchen ceiling put in when the house was built maybe a hundred years ago, and the northern window frame partly chewed away by a dog that had been shut inside, one night long before I was born. I remembered what I had completely forgotten—that I used to have a sandbox there, placed where my mother could watch me out that north window. A great bunch of overgrown spirea was flowering in its place now and you could hardly see out at all.
    The east wall of the kitchen had no windows in it but it had a door opening on a stoop where we stood to hang out the heavy wet washing, and haul it in when it was dry and smelling all fresh and congratulatory, from white sheets to dark heavy overalls.
    At that stoop I sometimes halted in my night walks. I never sat down but it eased me to look towards town, maybe just to inhale the sanity of it. All the people getting up before long, having their shops to go to, their doors to unlock and milk bottles to take inside, their busyness.
    One night—I can’t say whether it could be the twentieth or the twelfth or only the eighth or the ninth that I had got up and walked—I got a sense, too late for me to change my pace, that there was somebody around the corner. There was somebody waiting there and I could do nothing butwalk right on. I would be caught if I turned my back, and it would be worse that way than to be confronted.
    Who was it? Nobody but my father. He too sitting on the stoop looking towards town and that improbable faint light. He was dressed in his day clothes—dark work pants, the next thing to overalls but not quite, and dark, rough shirt and boots. He was smoking a cigarette. One he rolled himself, of course. Maybe the cigarette smoke had alerted me to another presence, though it’s possible that in those days the smell of tobacco smoke was everywhere, inside buildings and out, so there was no way to notice it.
    He said good morning, in what might have seemed a natural way except that there was nothing natural about it. We weren’t accustomed to giving such greetings in our family. There was nothing hostile about this—it was just thought unnecessary, I suppose, when we would see each other off and on all day.
    I said good morning back. And it must have really been getting towards morning or my father would not have been dressed for a day’s work in that way. The sky may have been whitening but hidden still between the heavy trees. The birds singing, too. I had taken to staying away from my bunk till later and later, even though I didn’t get comfort from doing so as I had at first. The possibilities that had once inhabited only the bedroom,