It’s been a long time since I slept in a tent. I’m hoping to keep that record intact for many years to come.
Not that I have any real issue with tents. It’s just that more body tends to no longer bend with the contours of the ground. All the bends and twists and bumps that are part of the shape of the earth are not part of the shape of my body and this body does not take kindly to trying to force it to take that shape.
Over the weekend, my grandson decided he needed to sleep in a tent. He had been digging around and come across a small tent in a storage area and felt it needed to be used. So we set it up outside and he decided to spend the night.
He was fully stocked with various snacks and a flashlight and really wasn’t very far away, but to him, it was an adventure. I did wonder if he would make it through the night, outside, by himself, but figured he was close enough to find his way back inside if he wanted. Off he went to spend his night in the wilderness.
In the morning, I awoke to find the door standing open and him back in his bed.
Was he uncomfortable and had to come in? No. Did something scare him in the night and make him come in? No. Something had woken him up first thing in the morning and he simply got tired of waiting for the rest of us to get up for breakfast, so he went back to bed for a while in a place where the noises that had woken him up would not bother him.
And what woke him so early in the morning? Mourning doves. A fair number of mourning doves had arrived first thing in the morning. Of course Mourning Doves not only make little cooing noises, they can also be rather noisy when they fly. It almost seems like their wings squeak.
I’ve often wondered about that. I feel like I should chase after them with a can of WD-40, trying to grease them up a bit so they can fly with a bit less racket.
And it would seem that noise is pretty loud, when everything else in the world is still quiet.
But it wasn’t the lumps in the ground. It wasn’t the things that go bump in the night. It was the mourning doves that finally brought the adventure to an end.
When I was younger, it was usually something like the tent collapsing on me that got me up in the morning. They build better tents now. Now maybe we could work on building better morning doves. Or at least quieter ones.
