Sleep Story

At my grandparents' house, I usually slept in the guest room on the first floor.  Down a tiny hallway off of the 'entrance' hall (which wasn't really an entrance hall since only strangers used the 'front' door), the guest room had three windows, two of which faced the spacious side-yard, which was bordered by the Chincoteague Bay and PawPaw creek on the east and south sides, and was empty except for a weathered picnic table and a large cedar tree.  The third window looked out on what I thought of as the 'front' yard, since it was the side of the house that we saw first when we arrived, since it faced the road.  Later I learned that the real front of the house was the side that faced the water, and was fronted by the wide, screened porch.  The 'front' yard contained the willow tree that I liked to climb and sit in. The willow branches made swish, swish noises when it was windy, which was always.  Inhabited by rhythmically-singing cicadas in the summer months, it was easy to climb.  I loved to collect the crispy brown shells that the cicadas left behind.  My grandmother would give me a paper lunch bag to keep them in, and I would take them home to my house in Elkridge, for my mother to throw away months later, no doubt, when these summer days were more distant and my thoughts were absorbed in the worries and business of school days.  Behind the willow tree ran the white-painted, two-planked fence which separated the yard from the end of the tar and gravel lane that dead-ended at the creek, and the low, narrow, ramshackle pier that reached out into the shallow, muddy water.  Across the lane stood the neighbors' house across a damp grassy lawn, and an expanse of salt marsh, and finally, from this same window you could see the bridge that crossed the creek.  Bayside Road ran, and still runs, along the Chincoteague Bay coast from Public Landing, swooping inland at Boxiron Creek and Brockatonorton Bay.  In the 1970s, the bridge still wasn't paved, and each car or pickup truck rumbled over the wooden bridge, the sound echoing off of the surface of muddy PawPaw Creek and drifting back toward the house.