No More Night-light

As a child, I always slept with a night-light. I guess having an overactive imagination made me "overly" sensitive to the dark. At night, I imagined that I saw monkeys hiding among my stuffed animals, aliens poking their heads up from the foot of my bed, bigfoot lurking in the closet, and Morlocks (an H.G. Wells-inspired horror) drooling in the shadows. That's where the night-light came to be my angel of slumber. Without this beacon in the dark, my nights would have been littered with fantastic frightening creatures of my imagination.

I have long since grown mature enough to turn off the night-light, but somehow not that overactive imagination. Sleeplessness remains a frequent night companion. That isn't what I'm writing about.

Back to the night-light. When Eudora was still a wee one, I always kept a light in her pen, above where she slept. It took two giant extension cords to rig that luxury. The light offered a small source of extra warmth during those long Teton Valley nights, but mostly, having light for some of those 10 pm feedings was greatly appreciated by the "nurse maid."

I am still afraid of the dark. I realized this one night a few weeks ago. It was 10 p.m., I had mixed up a bottle for baby, and was headed out to the lamb pen to tuck her into beddie-bye. The night was cloudy. After that bigfoot show on the Discovery channel I had watched the other day, my imagination was working on overdrive. I ran as fast as I could to the lamb pen, focusing my thoughts on the little animal crying "Maaa maa!" The light was shining bright; I unlatched the door, closed it behind me, and began feeding Eudora her bottle.

The wind was blowing--gusting, really. There was a slight hint of skunk in the air. I heard the greenhouse door lift out and settle back in place with the breeze. My common sense knew the sound was made by the greenhouse door and the wind, but my imagination refused to settle on anything sensical.

By the time I heard the smacking of Eudora sucking on an empty bottle, my mind was swimming in surreal and unsettling imaginings. In my head, I was so certain that bigfoot was standing just on the other side of the tarp behind me. That was the stench of sasquatch wafting with the wind. Every noise in the dark, every rustle, every scratch was the footfall of a gargantuan, nightmarish behemoth.

Eudora was settling down for the night, and it was time for me to run across the dark yard to the house. I started singing outloud, in a quavering voice, "Whenever I hear... the song of a bird..." The greenhouse door wacked again. I slipped out of the lamb pen and latched the door. "...or look at a..." The winded gusted with an eerie howl. I frantically looked around me--all was dark. Locking the lights from the house into my sights, I moved forward. "...a blue blue sky. Whenever I feel the rain on my..." Something slunk through the shrubs in the hippie-neighbor's yard. That was it. I yelped and dashed madly to the back door.

After that night, I never again went out to a ten o'clock feeding by myself.

Not until I reduced Eudora's feedings to twice a day did I finally take out the light. That was the beginning of this week. I figure if a girl is old enough to start eating solid food, she shouldn't need her night-light anymore. As long as Eudora doesn't have any bigfoot nightmares, she should be okay. And as long as I don't have to go outside in the dark, I should be okay.

Oh, and by the way, I do eat solid food and sleep without a night-light.

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