View from the North 40: My life has come to this, folks

I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable by bragging about what went on in my bedroom earlier this week, or jealous of my under-the-covers escapades, but I feel the strong need to overshare: Tuesday night, I slept for six whole hours.

That’s right, count ’em, six (6!) — six continuous, glorious, uninterrupted, peaceful, solid, sound hours of sleep. No getting up for the 3 a.m. potty break or just to move around, no waking up to roll over, no feline in my face requesting petting, no canine asking for door opening services to the outdoor loo, no horses whinnying, no husband snoring, no feet too hot or too cold, no weird dreams, no too many thoughts in my head, no early alarm, no wind. Nothing but slumber. It felt like heaven.

It also made me feel old.

I remember when six hours of sleep was a big deal only because I was sleeping in, and not waking in the middle of the night was standard operating procedure. I would open my eyes in the morning refreshed, and no comment was necessary because it happened virtually every night.

You know who commented about such things? The old people in my life. My parents, my grandparents. Sure, I knew I would age, but I always swore I wouldn’t do old-people-speak, talking about aches and pains and fading eyesight and “back in my day.” I am them now.

I’m like, “I’m so old I remember when dirt was brand new. Some folks out in the country invented it. No scientists, no researchers, it was a real grassroots movement — if you’ll pardon my pun, heheheh. That dirt got shared around and we worked to make our own. We didn’t go buy it in a bag at the store. Y’know kids these days don’t know what it was like tryna grow stuff in rock and gravel. That’s all we had. These youngins complain because their soil has too much clay or it has saline or ‘that tiny pebble of a rock bent my header.’ Wahwhahwah. I remember when we grew our vegetables for the whole year by planting our seeds in the surface cracks on a five-ton boulder because that’s all we had before dirt come to us. And we were thankful.”

That’s me.

I remember my dad telling me about his knee replacement surgery. I don’t know exactly what I thought replacement surgery entailed, but I was shocked to learn that the surgeon uses basically a tree saw to actually hack off and remove the ends of your leg bones and the joint and replaces them with manufactured items.

I kept saying, “They cut your leg off?” until he got annoyed by my need to clarify the details. I wasn’t daft about it, I emphasized a different word each time, and sometimes it was a question and sometimes a statement, so I was working from every angle that my brain could fathom to understand this procedure and his decision. He did, after all, authorize someone to cut his leg OFF.

He finally said that given enough pain and debilitation you’ll agree to almost anything.

I think about that sometimes, and I guess if my strong, outdoorsy, athletic, demi-god of a father can succumb to the relentless erosion of time and age, who am I to fight this sign of aging.

If you find me sitting on a sidewalk bench one of these days, catching my breath along my doddering journey down the block, sit for a spell and I’ll tell you about the olden days when I could wake up in the morning and lay in bed yawning and stretching — without pulling a muscle or putting my back out.

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Truly, though, that beautiful morning I felt like I should say, “Yessirree, I still got it,” then go smoke a candy cigarette at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .