Do you believe that the full moon affects our behavior? In my years of human services, I've always believed it to be true. We had a super moon on Saturday and I tell you, I think lunacy was afoot. I was sleeping in a state park in a tent with Offspring #2. Next to us was a sibling's tent with her two sons and her two golden retrievers. As we all settle down to go to sleep, Offspring #2 and I get the giggles. Again. We do this in tents and I don't know why. As conversation among the humans slowed down and dropped off, conversation among the barred owls picked up. This is not the time for barred owls to mate and most likely their offspring have fledged. So maybe the parent owls were communicating advice to their young. And the young owls were hooting back, "Yeah, yeah, I know!" A white cat with a black tail and black eye brows had been skulking around our campsite. Now that we went to bed it felt free to walk around our tents searching for snacks. We could hear it out there and see it in the light of the full moon. So that was the scene - tall trees, a full moon, a cat, and owls. I was in that state of being partly asleep and partly aware when I heard wings beating against the fabric of the tent right by my head. The wings pushed against the tent fabric 6 or 8 times. I screamed. I yelled, "It's got me! The owl has got me!" And then I woke up wondering why I screamed and why I thought an owl got me. It didn't make sense. Where would I get such a crazy idea? But I had the adrenalin and panic of a real situation. Offspring #2 sat up and asked what could she do. I could hear the fear in her voice. In the next tent my sibling jumped up to a standing position while her two golden retrievers jumped into her sleeping bag. Man, she acts quick in an emergency. It would have taken me a full 3 minutes to get to a standing position. This situation had all the comedy of a sit-com. We established we were all safe. No one was hurt. No one had been attacked by owls or cats or anything. Nobody was bleeding. Both tents were still intact. The excitement of panic morphed into comedy. While we all giggled we tried to figure out what happened. In the other tent one nephew heard something outside and kicked at the tent repeatedly to scare it away (leading me to believe a bird was brushing it's wings against the tent fabric and since it's night it must be an owl, right?) His panic was transferred to my apparently open mind by the light of the full moon and I took it from there and scared the bejeezus out of the entire campsite. I'm still giggling as I blog about it. My sibling shooed her dogs out of her sleeping bag and laid back down while we all giggled and tried to shake the panic and go back to sleep. I apologized for screaming. I don't scream at night otherwise. I've never woke up screaming before. What was going on? The absurdity of it all stuck with me and for a full hour I had to stifle my giggles so the others could sleep. It's hard for me to stifle giggles when I'm in a giggly mood so I tried to calm down by reviewing the cast of the Flintstones and as many episodes as I could remember. Normally aches and pains keep me up at night so having the giggles, although it was a problem, was a refreshing change. Oh, man, it might be best for me to sleep in the house during the next super moon.
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