awake in the night

I've been awake since 3:10 a.m. I have these rituals I go thru to help me go back to sleep: make a trip to the bathroom, get a drink, look outside, pray, listen to my mp3s on my Palm. If I'm still not getting sleepy, I start reading or journaling. I could have written many a novel in the hours I've been awake between midnight and 6 a.m.

Looking outside is advice from an old neighbor. "When you wake up at night, always look outside. You see the most interesting things!"

Mr. Charles was right. I've seen some pretty incredible things in my own yard or passing on my street in the wee hours. This morning, I watched my neighbor sit in the dark in his porch swing smoking a cigarette at 4 a.m. All I could see was the red glow in the dark - like Deep Throat in "All The President's Men". He's not insomniac; he just leaves for work about 5:00.

I think one of my neighbors (down the street) is a repo man. He flies down the street in a very large flat-bed truck at early odd hours and returns with cars of random description.

Twice in the last year I've seen a car pass my house at very high speed and return moments later dragging a large green waste receptable, distributing it's contents all over the neighborhood. One morning back in the summer I heard a crash and popped to the window to see someone backing out of our yard after they ran over our mailbox and broke the post.

A friend told me of getting up one night and seeing 2 foxes playing under a full moon in the lawn outside her kitchen window. The next day she mentioned to a neighbor what she had seen, and the neighbor said she too had see the foxes and was so enchanted by them in the moonlight, she had wakened her husband to watch.

Always look outside when you wake in the night. You will see the most interesting things!