4:00 am

Its four in the morning and I can’t sleep.  I don’t remember not being able to sleep as a kid.  Well, to be honest that’s not completely true.  Hot summer nights would find me laying awake, sticky with perspiration, with my head at the bottom of the bed facing the one window in the room trying to catch a breeze which, more often than not, never came.  There was no air conditioning in the 50’s – at least not in our house, or even in our neighborhood for that matter.  My room was small, barely big enough for the bed and a dresser.  Although my parents managed to squeeze a small desk in a corner so I could study. . .  but my study habits, or lack thereof, are a story for another time.

There were three bedrooms in the house, an interesting situation for a family of eight kids and two parents.  My mom and dad occupied the “front” bedroom which was bit larger that the two “back” bedrooms.  I shared last of the back bedrooms first with my sister, until she left home when I was nine, and then with my younger brother Jackie.  When I got to be of a certain age, Jackie was moved out and I had a bedroom all to myself.  I bet I was the only one in the family who ever did.  My brothers slept wherever they could find space.  I remember a bedroom of sorts set up in the unfinished basement (with sheets strung on clothes lines to mark off their “room”) and another in the enclosed, but unheated, back porch.  Although after my dad got a second job they were able to insulate and heat the porch.  My brother, Mickey, bragged that he slept in every room in the house, including the pantry.  That was true.  My parents set a cot up under the shelves for him.

But I’ve digressed.  Hot summer night always were an issue when it came to sleeping. Especially hot, humid nights which is Chicago’s speciality.  If it got really bad, my parents would pull out the lawn chairs – –  the kind with the multicolored plastic straps running criss cross – –  put them in the middle of the yard and they’d lay on the two chairs while the rest of us threw sheets on the grass to try to sleep.  It was just too stuffy in the house.  Despite the heat it could be pretty nifty out there at times. If we get any breeze at all,  I would lay there and listen to the leaves rustling in the wind.   It was a lullaby that helped me fall asleep. After my dad got a second job we got a window air conditioner in the dining/living room and more often that not, that’s were you’d find me on a hot night.  Maybe all of this is why, to this day, I like to sleep in an ice cold room.  Even in the winter I turn the heat down and open the windows.  Drives my husband crazy but now I can tell him I figured out why I do it.

© Eileen Murphy Donnersberger