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September 13, 2005

It's all happening at the zoo

I wake up at 4:15 this morning with my neighbor's light shining into my bedroom. They moved in a couple of months ago and one of the first things they did was install a spotlight on the back of their house. They leave it on all night long--why, I'm not exactly sure. I don't really understand their need for constant illumination. Maybe it's the light = good, dark = bad theory ... or maybe they are afraid of the raccoons, or afraid that burglars will swim across the lake and break into their house unless they've got enough candlepower to erase all chances of anything slinking up to their back door. Erase all those pesky shadows.

Whatever the reason, I hate that light. I like it to get dark, and I like--or liked, anyway--looking out of my bedroom window and seeing only the shadows of the trees, pretending my bed was in the middle of the woods, like camping.

I try and fail to go back to sleep, so I get up and write my neighbors a note, asking them to please turn off the spotlight. I try not to sound crabby, which I am because I haven't had a whole lot of sleep in the past week or so. I try, in my note, to say how wonderful I think it is, or has been up to now, to look into the night, to smell the lake but to not be able to see it through the darkness, and I try to do this in as few words as possible so that I don't come across as weird, which I guess I probably am. Then I put the note in their mailbox.

I go back into the house, feed Spike, have a cup of coffee, and read the paper, and there is this brief article: Sheriff's deputies found 11 children locked in cages rigged with alarms in a house about 60 miles west of Cleveland. The children, ages 1 to 14, were in cages in the walls of the house and had no blankets or pillows ... Mike and Sharen Gravelle are adoptive or foster parents for all 11 children, officials said. The Gravelles do not have a listed phone number. No listed phone number, but they probably have a big ol' spotlight hooked up on the back of their house.

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)