I have trouble convincing myself to be in bed by 12am.
I am often awake past 1am. Maybe it is ADHD.
It isn't helpful that when I do manage to fall asleep at or before 10pm, like maybe in hopes of getting a decent amount of sleep before waking up at maybe 7-7:30ish, I tend to wake up several times at night. When I procrastinate till 1am, though, I sleep the whole night through. Some part of my brain has learned this lesson, and it makes justifying going to bed at a decent hour so much harder. Lack of sleep just makes my ADHD worse, compounding the problem.
Last night I did manage to get to bed at a decent hour, but as usual, I woke up in the middle of the night. Well, 3am'ish. And I fooled around for a bit till about 5am'ish and decided to try sleeping again. When I woke up, it was at 7:30am because I left my clock radio alarm on despite this being a long weekend. It wasn't a loud alarm; the radio was just playing the morning news. But it was raining, and I smiled, listening to raindrops splash on the plastic patio shade outside my window. My apartment in Mississippi doesn't have such a patio outside my bedroom's window, but my room in my parent's house in New Mexico did. And for a time, I just stayed in bed, listening to the rain drown out the radio and the day's news. I smiled; I am one of those weirdo darklings that are happy when it rains.
I had been such a long time since it had rained like this in New Mexico. Aqua es vida. It happened much more often when I was a kid. Back then, the back yard was covered in grass. Every winter, there were decent snowstorms that covered the ground in at least an inch of snow. Supposedly, when I was a toddler, the snow got deeper than that. There were soft rains in the spring when the wind wasn't blowing, and during monsoon season, enough rain fell to flood the back yard. There was grass that my mom delighted in mowing and aerating and trees for shade and fruit. There was a strawberry plant by my bedroom window that hardly needed any care.
But as I grew in age, the world around me became dryer and dryer. I knew, at least in an academic sense, that I lived in a desert. But it wasn't the Sahara, it wasn't the Gobi, it wasn't Iraq. It was at the edge of the Sonoran desert, and the nature programs said that no matter how dry it got, the rains would always come! Besides the mountains of Southern Colorado where my father's family came from and highlands of Northern Jalisco where my mother's family came from, I hadn't experienced climates much wetter than Central New Mexico, and they weren't too much wetter. Those places, too, gradually became drier and drier. My mother had to water the lawn more often, and she insisted on mowing the grass any time seed heads popped up. I warned my mother that mowing the lawn so short was going to kill the lawn and that longer grass retained moisture better and crowded out the weeds, but because she was getting too old for lawncare and I was the right age to take over, I was just making excuses to be lazy. But the the weeds did take over, just before they also died. Rivers ran dry as most, then all the water was diverted to water crops. Trash crops, like alfalfa, which did not even feed people but instead feed the cows that had already overgrazed the grassy public lands and left them full of scrub and tumbleweeds. I grew angry at the great cities in the desert like Phoenix and Las Vegas full of people who believed they had conquered the desert by pulling water out of the Colorado River to water the grand lawns and golf courses, water that would never return to the river, causing the Colorado river to dry up before it even reached the sea. But the people around me were no saints either. When satellite imagery became more publicly available via Google Maps and so on, I noticed vast networks of dirt roads in the desert, and they weren't laid out like farm roads or as road simply connecting points of interest. These were laid out like city blocks, like suburbs. I asked my father, and he told me of the great plans people made in the 1960's and 1970's to build magnificent cities in the desert before realizing -- there will be no (cheap) water. And this was back in a time when Central New Mexico was even wetter than it was in the 1990's, during my childhood. We were spared becoming a sprawling city like Las Vegas and Phoenix because of economics and a lack of interest in developing a region populated mostly by Hispanics.
Maybe also because New Mexicans refused to join the Confederacy and certain Arizonans and Texans in power still held onto that grudge.
Later I would learn of another failed planned city in the desert, California City, and of the drought that ended the Anasazi civilization. The dryness of New Mexico wasn't unusual, it was the 1960's and 1970's that were unusually moist, and had convinced people that Eastern California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas were worth settling and building up. Of course, the current global climate change is causing the drought to worsen locally at a quicker pace.
I had left New Mexico, partially out of fear of another civilization destroying drought.
But all that faded away. It was finally raining again, just like it did when I was a kid. This rain would fix everything and make the green grass come back. If only it would rain like this more often.
But...
The clock radio I was barely hearing wasn't in New Mexico. It was sitting in my apartment's kitchen in Mississippi and I forgot to turn off the alarm when I went to bed last night. And just two or so hours ago, I had finally gone back to bed after walking around my apartment to get rid of some bed soreness.
I wasn't wake and lying in bed at my parents' home in New Mexico, I was half-awake-half-dreaming, lying in bed in my apartment in Mississippi, listening to the rain.
And deeply wished that I could bring this rain with me to New Mexico.
