Sleeping Outside

A week of summer heat with no cooling breeze or break made bedrooms like brick kilns still hot after a day's firing. You couldn't sleep. Air conditioning back then was a couple of loud, clunking fans that blew a hum of hot air. To get relief we would all sleep outside on the back lawn on hessian camping beds that sagged and creaked even under a child's weight. The night air carried a slight damp and the hint of a breeze. I can remember laying back under a blaze of stars, giddy and full of questions at such wonder strung in filaments overhead. Uncertainty and doubt had begun to pick my childish world apart. I would grip the sides of the bed possessed by a strange sense that if I let go, I would fall upwards into the sky. I could never get to sleep even when a cool came upon the early morning air. There were too many sounds I could not explain and shadows my mind would shape into threats. I would creep back inside, back into a walled safety and the heat.