Snoring

I am not going to use her name. She is one of my favorite people, and I do not want to embarrass her. Much. She made the trip with us to Lake Village and stayed with Penny and me. 

Sometime during the night I woke up to her whining and tossing in the bed like a young child who has worms. Later she began to snore. She sounded like a lot of things. I was even dreaming in the early morning hours that I was writing down a list of things her snoring sounded like. The list went like this:

•      a large barn animal dying with pneumonia
•      a jet engine in distress
•      a huge gorilla with sinus issues
•      a small child blowing a duck call
•      a grizzly bear warning people to say away from his kill
•      a runaway diesel engine

One of those, the huge gorilla, transported me to my childhood. When I was little, my grandmother, Mom's mom, would come visit us. She slept in the room with me. You guessed it: she snored. There was something spooky about her snoring. It caused me to envision a gorilla behind the bedroom door. As she snored, this gorilla would become more and more lifelike, more real. Eventually, I could see his nostrils flare as he breathed and see the moisture just inside the rim of those massive nose. Not long after the gorilla became that real, I would begin to scream. Mom and Dad always thought it was shadows coming in through the bathroom window that frightened me. I never told them it was Granny.

Fast forward thirty years. Forrest and I were on a church camping trip. He woke me up crying.

"Daddy. There's a bear outside the tent," he cried in terror. 

I listened a second. "It's OK, son. That's Brother Moudy snoring."

I remember thinking, if I were a child that snoring would have frightened me too. I know that sounds like a tale, but it really happened just like that. 

So what's the point?

None whatsoever.