It is spring, and last night we opened the door from our bedroom to the outside porch. From the pond behind our house came a Morman Tabernacle Choir of lovesick frogs and geese all calling to one another. The uproar was quite amazing but, rather than being distracting, it brought back memories of the sleeping porch.
Growing up in hot, humid Washington, DC, before the advent of air conditioning, the summer heat was combated by moving my bed to the screened porch attached to the back of the row house in which my mother and I lived. Out there I drifted off to sleep to the sound of crickets, frogs and other nighttime creatures all singing in their various cadences and rhythms. In the case of a gentle rain, I listened with pleasure as the drops hit the leaves of the woods behind our house, silencing the night creatures. When the sky was torn with thunder and lightning, my bed would be pushed up against the house, and I would take refuge in my mother’s bed for the night.
My mother had grown up in a Marine Corps household, and one of the places she had lived in the 1930s was Haiti. I loved stories of her time there which included my favorite, a story about the sleeping porch on which she and her sister slept during the hot summer months. She awoke there one morning to find a shed snakeskin under her bed. In the dark of night that creature had slithered under her bed and shed its skin before sliding off into the dark. The family measured the discarded skin, and it was eight feet long. Or at least that is what my mother’s memory of what her ten-year-old self had thought. But I believed her, and the story sent shivers down my spine. It caused me to take a careful look under my bed in the morning before my feet hit the floor. How a snake would get to the second story porch of our home, much less even exist in the city did not occur to me. It just paid to be careful.
So now, as I listen to the symphony that comes from our pond, I remember that small girl asleep under the stars with a gentle nighttime breeze blowing over her pajama-clad form. A nice memory, but I am glad when the real heat settles in, I have that wonderful air-conditioning to turn on.