Hick’s To the Left of Me, Pony’s To the Right, Here I Am Stuck In NoMaLa With You

Val has a bone to pick with her cohabitants. It’s not a tidy, cute little bone like a wishbone that you and your sister, the future ex-mayor’s wife, can snap without sullying your fingers. No sirree, Bob! This is a raggedy, ungainly, flesh-flapping bone, like the deer legs that show up on our front porch. Backroads, we have a problem. Hick and The Pony are stealing ZZZZs and winks and fence-jumping sheep from Val every morning.

It’s true. My chair-nap time has shrunk from 30 minutes to a paltry seven. Ten if I’m lucky.

It is my habit to arise at 4:50 a.m., pack lunches, take a shower, wake The Pony, and hit the La-Z-Boy for a nap. That plan worked for years. But now it has become all but obsolete.

The Pony gets the ball rolling at 5:30. That’s when I’m out of the shower. I remind Hick to get up, then I walk to the other end of the house and shout through The Pony’s door that it’s 5:30. He answers back that he knows. He has his phone set to wake him.

All his life, The Pony has been a good go-to-bedder and a good getter-upper. But now he tarries. Sometimes it takes ten minutes for him to come out of his room. That means I can’t start my chair nap. The Pony takes his phone to the front window to turn on his internet. Then he logs on my laptop. From there he heads to the kitchen to fill his own feedbag with breakfast before passing through the living room again on his way to the basement. That’s kind of distracting to one attempting a snooze in the recliner.

Still, I should have a good 20 minutes of sleep ahead of me. But no. Hick must stump around on the tile bathroom floor on the other side of the wall with his footless ankles, rattling the shower door, succumbing to countless cases of The Dropsy from the sound of his plastic toothbrush glass bouncing in the sink, his phone, the comb, shampoo bottle, soap, and assorted morning toilette accouterments hitting hard surfaces. AND he has been leaving the bathroom by 5:50 to chat with me on his way out the door, cutting sharply into my power nap.

How do you solve a problem like Maria? I don’t know. Even all those nuns couldn’t figure it out. But it has to be easier than figuring out how to get my nap back.

So here I am every morning, stuck in The No Man’s Land of Not-Nodding.