Night Light

Nighttime is just about the most comfortable part of my day. Partially, that is because the heat and humidity tend to drop - a bit - so while the daytime feels like living in a pot of hot soup, things become marginally more pleasant and bearable once the sun is down. I can go outside for a walk, or leave the window open and enjoy the delicious breaths of perfumed wind that drift in, bringing the scent of daylilies with them. Things become quieter, too. I turn the fans off at night, so the constant whir of their blades and motors stops only when day has ended. I’m sure you can tell by now, dear reader, that summer is not my favourite season, and the kind of humidity one finds out East is still foreign to me - and I to it.

I have lived all my life in cities. Two big ones, and one medium one, and for a brief time, a tiny one, really more of a town, which just squeaked past the population requirements, pushing it toward city status. In all cases, I have been used to the soundtrack that usually accompanies such places, especially at night. The thrum of cars, the indistinct murmur of people talking, of neighbours walking overhead and dogs barking in backyards. This is my normal. But every once in a while, especially in summer, I long for a different kind of night music.

‘The Lake’ is a kind of catch-all term that people from the Prairies use to describe leaving the city. “I’m going to the lake” could mean there is an actual body of water at said destination, or it could mean roughing it in a campground with a tent, or it could mean a carpeted summer home with a dishwasher and a flat screen television. In my childhood, ‘the lake’ meant a cottage facing out over a dark, root beer brown lake in the White Shell (the lake was quite safe, just full of tannins). The cottage had non-potable water, mismatched furniture, and black bears, so our trash had to be driven to a special garbage site and locked in a caged dumpster. There was a green canoe, an orange paddle boat, and a dock with a rickety ladder so you could inch your way into the freezing water, one rung at a time. The living room of this cottage is burned in my memory, very likely because of a pair of taxidermied ducks on one wall, and a similarly stuffed goose over the television set, which did not get a signal but could play the three or four VHS tapes on offer. I watched Muppet Treasure Island on repeat until my parents were close to mutiny themselves.

Daytime at ‘the lake’ was full of swimming and cavorting around in the woods and devouring watermelon and swimming some more and taking one of the boats out to see the litle island in the middle of the lake, and reading on the dock and throwing dried peas to the flock of geese that visited and hanging towels to dry on the porch and banging the screen door and using my father’s binoculars to spot otters and muskrat and practicing somersaults in the lake and hunting for sliders and playing in the reeds and losing a shoe in the mud and listening for mice in the boathouse and running everywhere. There was too much to do and only so much daylight.

Night was a different matter. I was not keen on the dark at home, in my streetlight-lit suburb, but at the lake, the blackness that settled over everything wasn’t just the dark - it was The Dark. I would lie awake sometimes, trying to see anything, my eyes wide and staring into nothing, but there was no light to be had. Going to the bathroom or getting a cup of water was a terrifying prospect to a pre-teen with an overactive imagination. And when there is no light, no visual data to be had, one becomes very aware of sounds. There were birds who sang themselves to sleep as the sun dropped, and sometimes a loon would let out a crazed, heartbroken whoop in the night, but mostly nighttime brought a symphony of insects. There were crickets (very pleasant) and cicadas (horrible), and worst of all, the solitary mosquito, with its squealing, maddening hum, searching for a late-night snack in the dark - and I was the snack. Of course, the minute you turned on a light, the droning would stop. Was there a more satisfactory, glorious moment, though, when you did finally slam a hand down on said mosquito, and your room would go blissfully, beautifully quiet?

I had a little battery-operated toy lantern, which I used as a nightlight. It was green plastic and shaped like an old-fashioned hurricane lantern, with a handle on top and a flat, circular base. It threw a wan pool of light in my otherwise pitch-black room, casting shadows on the walls and keeping the monsters in my mind at bay. They say you can never go back, which is true, but, oh, dear reader, what I wouldn’t give for the deep, untroubled sleep of a ten-year-old who had played herself to exhaustion, watched Muppet Treasure Island until her eyelids grew heavy, and then drifted into dreams in the darkest, quietest, most peaceful room on earth, her nightlight burning faithfully beside her.

Jennifer