Member-only story
It was an early Sunday morning twenty-five years ago or so. My wife and I were at a campground in Western Massachusetts where we often spent long summer weekends. Our camper was small and not well heated, but we were still young enough to ignore that. We loved our weekends. We loved camping.
We had spent the night before dancing to loud music at the camp clubhouse. I should have been able to sleep in, but a lifetime of early rising makes it hard for me to stay long in bed. The warmth of my wife’s softly snoring body said I should stay, but though I closed my eyes and cast about for the fading threads of a dream, I was waking up. I wanted to fall back into sleep, but my body said no.
At home, getting up would simply mean rolling out of bed and stealing silently from the bedroom to the rest of the house. But we were at camp. Our camper provided very little house to roam about, and there was also the fact that I was on the inside of a bed open only on one side. I was boxed in by the walls of the camper and a closet. There was only one means of egress, and that involved clambering over my wife. She was sleeping soundly, I did not wish to disturb her, so I tried to close my eyes yet again.
Silly me. The sun came through the thin curtains and colored the insides of my eyelids red. This…
