Night Lights and Alarm Clocks

Though I'm hardly an insomniac, I do spend a lot of time walking around the house in the middle of the night. This has been true for as long as I can remember: even in the dead of winter, when the house is cold, I will wander if I cannot sleep. It might just be a short walk to the bathroom, and those trips are probably the majority. But there's something about the darkness and stillness of the middle of the night that has always appealed to me. There is a hushed sense in the hallways, sleepy silence even in the empty guest rooms, and lovely dancing moonbeams filtered through the trees. The cat, if I wake her with my footfalls, comes to greet me in the hallway or on the stairs with soft purring and her distinctive chirps. Usually the dog doesn't stir. None of my dogs have ever stirred during my nightly perambulations, which used to make getting back into bed a challenge.

I like to look out the windows or peer down into the foyer to see how the shadows from the streetlight look at this hour. As familiar as my home is to me, in the darkness it is an entirely different landscape. The nightlight in the laundry illuminates the kitchen island bookshelves. The woods are perfect blackness outside my office window on moonless nights - there is nothing at all to be discerned. The whiskey barrel fountain out front sounds entirely different at night - not the rolling, bubbling sound of the daytime but a distinct bell-like tinkling sound. I have no idea why. But I wouldn't know any of these useless facts if I didn't wander at night.

This morning I didn't venture out into the hall. I peered out the northern bedroom window for quite some time, but there was little to be seen. On the other side of the room, near my side of the bed, I stood at the balcony door and listened to the local rooster begin his morning song. The moon must have been right overhead, as I've never seen such a short shadow of the white oak that stands just outside our bedroom. The balcony rails were illuminated, but cast no shadow on the decking. The light was cool and almost blue and I wanted to know how my skin would appear in such a light. I stepped outside to watch and listen for a moment.

Now, I've known for a long time that there is more than one rooster out there. We are surrounded by corn and chicken farms out here - not big operations, but family acreage and truck farms. This morning I heard the closest rooster calling out: urh-ur-ur-ur-oooourh. In the near distance another bird returned his call. Then from another direction, yet another rooster. The calls sounded identical, but they were clearly coming from different directions and distances. In the otherwise hushed morning I heard seven - no, eight - must be nine or ten different birds, some of their calls faint and almost imperceptible between the more local sounds. I wonder: do they wake one another? Is there a purpose to their calls? Is this just a territorial bugling, do they rile each other up the way barking dogs do? There was not another sound in the night, no wind, no distant traffic, no crickets. I stood for a moment in what seemed like a sea of rooster calls, all of them soft against the darkness. I suppose if this sound were to be coming from my backyard, it would wake me. But this morning the sounds soothed me almost to sleep. I noticed, just before I dropped off into morning slumbers, that the crowing had stopped.