Sleeping on the Trampoline

Hey all,

I know the image is just a blank shot, hopefully you’ll understand in a minute.

So, I’m back. Mostly.

It’s been a bit of a crazy month since I last dropped a story here, what with revisions, and resubmissions, and an election, and well, life.

I feel like once this book is back in beta reader’s hands, or publishers hands, or somebody else’s hands, I’ll probably get back to the online content more seriously, but until such time as that happens new stories or blogs may be a bit sparse.

Have you, yourself, ever spent the night sleeping on a trampoline? I did on several occasions as a child, though I’m not really sure how common that is.

The happened most frequently while visiting my grandmother’s house. Because we had a big family (as in extended family) there was a chance for there to be as many as a dozen cousins at the house, plus all their parents. This sometimes created the need for some unique sleeping arrangements.

But this story is about a very particular night. It happened during one of our BIG family reunions, the ones where not just our normal family, but several of my grandmother’s brothers and sisters joined us. Many of the cousins that would come to these roughly bi-yearly events were only passingly familiar to the rest of us kids that got to visit grandma nearly any weekend we wanted to.

As one of the older cousins, I ended up on a trampoline with I think eight other kids. I know my brother was one of them, along with two of our first cousins, but the rest were second (or more) cousins.

As was common at these reunions, everyone played well into the night with the adults singing songs or telling stories, and us kids playing No Bears Are Out Tonight, or Capture the Flag. Once the time came to go to bed, us children gather our sleeping bags and gather on the trampoline.

The trick was that you wanted to sleep with your feet facing the middle and your head out by the springs, providing the most support, and keeping us from all slamming our heads together in the dead of night. Normally, were it just me and my siblings, or our close cousins, we’d likely stay up talking until near sunup. However, with several visitors on this night, everybody mostly went to sleep right away.

Except for me. I don’t know whether I had just eaten to much candy, or what, but I was pretty awake. With nothing much else to do, I stared up at the night sky. Being in rural Idaho, far away from any kind of large or even small town, the night would get very dark, and you could see nearly every star in the sky.

I had been awake for some time and had finally decided to just try closing my eyes and trying to sleep. I had barely had a chance to do this though when through my closed eyelids I saw a flash of some kind. For a second I panicked, thinking that there might be a thunderstorm heading out way. As we were completely at the mercy of the elements, this was a very worrying thought. It was at that moment that I saw something that will be burned into my memory forever.

A monstrous, bright blue, meteor roared across the night sky, so bright that it lit up the ground brighter than a full moon. I remember thinking that I must have been dreaming. When I blinked I would see its outline, and after a moment I determined I was perfectly awake and alert. Then it happened again, and again, and… well you get the point.

For the next hour or more I watched a gigantic shooting star after gigantic shooting star lit up the night sky as bright as any manmade fireworks show. It was a marvel I have never again witnessed. I tried waking my brother, only to realize I was actually shaking one of my less well known cousins, but no body else ever stirred. It was a private show, all for me.

Years later I would do some research and found that a meteor shower that peaks like every thirty or forty years had been peaking that summer. My guess is on that night, it was at its zenith.

I remember that night as if it happened yesterday. It’s something I wish I could show my children, my friends, anybody. But it will remain a secret show that only lives on in my memories.

Until next we read friends, take care, and keep looking to the stars…