. . . sleep was difficult to come by, as if it were minted out of diamonds. How can one mint anything out of diamonds you might ask? None of your damned business. The metaphor is mine to abuse.
My mind would be whirling about like one of those leaf cyclones one finds on a windy autumn day in the junction of two outdoor walls, tumbling about in blind attempts to make order out of the day's events. Sometimes I could settle things down by pulling the covers up under my chin and imagining I was in the cockpit of a sailboat tossed by stormy seas. The bed itself was the boat and the waves were breaking over the prow right there at the footboard. Wind and salt spray and enormous animals beneath the opaque surface of the pewter sea . . . I could lay back and close my eyes and take control of the wheel and counteract the pitch and yaw of the boat as the storm attempted to throw my small boat against a lee shore. In this way I could find a way to focus, relax, sleep.
In the summer I would stand at the window and peer out through the screens out over the front yard where the birches bent over like weeping women, out through the thicket that we referred to, euphemistically, as The Field. At the end of Adams Farm Rd. was a tumbled down New England stone wall that had been laid out by generations of Adams farmers, barely visible now through the grab vines and poison ivy and the stand of enormous maple trees that lined North Ave. At night you could watch the lights of the cars as they flickered among the trees, through the thicket of The Field, going about their late night business along North Ave. There was a rhythm to the way the lights flickered and it meshed with the doppler-smoothed sound of their travelling engines.
North Ave. met Long Lots at a perpendicular angle and I could watch the flickering lights through the trees along that road too - though they were further away. Because of their distance the headlights were like the embers of a smoldering fire that was moving inevitably our way. We would be forced to evacuate, scramble out the back door all together, all in our sleep-wear, and escape down Linda Lane.
From my window I could see the flickering fire of Long Lots traffic, and above it I could see the strange inversion of geography that made it seem as I we were perched on the rim of a shallow bowl and looking out across a concavity that was three miles or so wide. On the other rim was the purple black strip of Long Island Sound - the sea! Above the rim of the trees you could see the Sound and it appeared to be up and above us, just to the East - a purple strip on the horizon like a world in between the earth and sky.
