It’s humid as hell during a heat wave in NYC.   Sekhnet does not sleep enough, even under ideal circumstances.   This morning she had to be up at 6:00 a.m., to water her garden before heading off to Katonah for a work assignment.   At 1 a.m. she was still doing something.  I urged her to go to sleep and she eventually fell asleep on the couch.  It was around 80 degrees downstairs and moist.

When I went upstairs an hour later, where it was several degrees hotter, she’d crept up there somehow.   She was on the bed, splayed out like a star fish, with both tower fans pointed at her.   There was little point trying to squeeze on the small bed with her so I let her sleep and went into the other room to pound at the keys of this computer.  

By 4:00 I was ready for sleep, pointed one of the fans slightly northward and went horizontal on a northerly sliver of bed.  She stirred, made some ridiculous remarks, only half awake, and then fell back asleep.   It was too hot to sleep, but she flopped an arm affectionately over me.  A few minutes later I slipped out of bed for a cool drink.   Could not shut my mind off.  Read a bit.  At 4:45 or so I tried again.  Then it was light outside and birds began sending out their tweets.  Sekhnet’s friend “Pietro” was back, imitating a dozen other calls and then singing his manic, signature “Pietro, Pietro, Pietro!!!”

“My father always liked Pietro,” she told me once.  Her father named him Pietro.  I knew she’d be glad he was back.  She was.

Weird babble began, her odd comments, my amused answers, her soft, slightly mad chortles.  The bed was hot, and she was still mostly asleep.  Soon the radio alarm went off, it was probably about 5:30.  Sekhnet likes to hit snooze as many times as possible before she gets up, but this time she was too wiped out to reach for the snooze bar.  I was almost asleep when her other alarm, a weird, electronic chiming guaranteed to get a sleeping person’s attention, went off.  Then, seemingly, a third alarm began to bleat.

“Sekhnet’s house of horrors,” I said grimly, to a cackle from Sekhnet.   

“Wake me up in five minutes,” she said, amid the cacophony of alarms.

I told her I would, if I wasn’t lucky enough to be unconscious in five minutes.   I wasn’t lucky enough, but she was soon enough up and out of bed, heading to the garden.