I”m up late.  It’s half past midnight. My usual bedtime is around 9 but I stayed up late last night. I learned a tip – it costs twice as much if you bring an animal into the 24 hour vet after midnight. So my cat was out by midnight yesterday. Now I”m staging up to give him his every 8 hours medicine. It’s called love.

And worry. We don’t want to lose Garfield like we did his brother when we moved to cohousing. That is a bad memory for the whole family. The prognosis looks good this time but he’s still not eating.  I’ll keep waking up and sleeping strangely until he’s all better.

When I got home last night I was ready to plop into the bed but I left the medicine in the car.  I went to retrieve it at midnight and found a treat. A neighbor was up with her dog – throwing a ball back and forth. I asked if she is up late often. She replied she sleeps at four hours at a time, wakes up for awhile, and returns to sleep. We discussed how we heard this may have been normal at one time before we all started banker’s hours.

It’s happened before, where I bump into a neighbor in the parking lot, or the mailbox, or the conference room and we chat at any old time. I realized this is the life I was promised at cohousing but never realized.  It wasn’t just Covid but the fact that the common house was a bit of a trek in the dark and we had a few sightings of animals I preferred not to meet in the night. One early morning I stumbled in the dark to the parking lot to go to work and heard noise. I asked, “Is that a person or a bear?”  I was relieved when it responded, “Bear” Good for a laugh but the real bears had walked between cars at other times.

So one night I was up late during a black out and I felt alone and then dismayed to see other coho neighbors were up but we were each in our own houses. How did I know they were up? One sent out an email to all of us about the black out and the other posted in the Neighborhood social media app.  I had heard that cohousing meant going to the common house at any time and meeting up with neighbors, even insomniacs. I didn’t find that. Blame it on the bears?