After Midnight

It is past midnight and something has pulled me out of my light sleep. Some evenings sleep comes like a full sedative and other evenings it hangs in the air over my bed taunting me by blowing air in my face each time I start to go under.

I watch the moon's light dance across the bedroom ceiling...is that what aroused my senses?  Clouds mask the pearl and the room darkens once again.

Then I hear another sound outside the window. It is the geese convention that meets here in February.  It is a large convention of strutters and flappers and hearty laughers.  There are hundreds of them tucked all the way to the end of our finger of the river, and all it takes is one tip-toeing fox to set them off on a chorus line of brassy musical crescendos faking bravery.

I wait and once again comes the hush of night,  the sound of an appliance whooshing softly, the air ducts clicking with the warmth pushing into the room.

Then I hear another sound more clearly.  The sound of rain washing against a skylight in the other part of the house, rain that in minutes changes to pattering hail, tossing tiny orbs of ice as if in some ball game, a tapping so gentle that it should put me back into sleep, but it does not, because I must go back to bed and I am now up.