Its 3:15 am and I am wide awake. My neck tells me a storm is coming. Like an old person from my childhood, my body tells me when the weather is changing. I lay there and drift off, to wake again. I look at the new watch my wife got me for Christmas, it’s now 3:20. I smell the watchband. Unlike my old one, this watch does not smell like smoke from all the fires I worked in my old job. When I get out of bed and walk across the cabin floor, I’m like an old cowboy in a western movie. By the time I reach the puppy’s dog crate my body has reconnected itself.

I let the puppy out and we walk outside. She moves across the ground like a four-legged bullet full of life. In the dark we cross the pond dam. In the distance a beaver slaps his tail on the water to warn the other beavers of danger. The puppy and I are the danger to them. I’m not sure if they heard us or smelled us, but no matter how, they know we are here.

I sit down at the almost-out campfire and roll my neck to loosen it up. I smell the remnants of the campfire smoke. Sometimes it calms me and other times it keeps me awake. Almost two years ago, while carrying a person out of the scene of a fatal fire, I injured my neck. I never reported it to the boss because I was raised to work, and because I had injured my neck when I was a teenager. Weeks later at a triple fatal fire it was re-injured. After months of physical therapy, I had to have two vertebrae surgically fused and a fake disc put in. I still go to physical therapy because my arm has not fully recovered from the two nerves that were pinched in my neck.

The puppy runs around me with a small stick in her mouth. Ain’t nothing like a puppy to make you forget the things that keep you awake.

I go back in the cabin and lay my towel on the floor for my morning stretches. I think some city people would call it yoga. But a country boy who drives diesel four-wheel drive trucks, eats the meat from his hunts, likes staying in a cabin with no utilities, and takes great pride that his daddy worked in a rock quarry just calls it stretching. The puppy insists on sharing the towel, and like the 2 shepherds before her I embrace the sharing. She still has that puppy smell, and for a moment I am stretching with the two before her.

I wake up the boys and the oldest says he wants to sleep in. I get wanting to sleep in. A life full of color sometimes causes us not to sleep. Back when I taught, I used to tell people, “Is it the event you are trying to process that keeps you awake, or is it the puzzle you cannot figure out that keeps you awake?” Most of the time for me it was the puzzle. I wanted to give answers to the families of the loved ones they just lost in a fire.

Before dawn, the youngest boy and I walk down this little road we made years ago. Two tractors, a chain saw, and a dad and his sons made this road. I have tripped about 20 times over a tree we did not cut close enough to the ground, but I choose to not trim it. It reminds me of how this road came to be.

My boy tells me he loves me and leaves the road, weaving his way between the un-manicured trees that guide him to his perch. I climb into my perch some minutes later, with the wind blowing erratically today. A deer, like most animals, relies on its sense of smell to protect it from danger. The doe educates her fawns on what smells represent danger, but I feel some of their education is born in them. We as humans are educated by our parents to the dangers of the world, but most of our lessons are visual and very much verbal. As we find our path, all five senses work to educate us to how we should respond. Should we run? Should we fight? What our senses take in and learn can dictate what our reaction to the event will be.  Does the event associate with a good experience or was the event difficult to process?

I am blessed that the campfire smell is generally good. But if you add a plastic smell to it, I am standing back in the house of someone who just died there. I say that some things keep me awake and this is true. The things that keep me awake also made me the man I am. From each dead person I cared for I received a greater appreciation for life. For every family member I attempted to comfort I had a clearer purpose for my life.

The youngest texts he has seen two deer. I have not seen a deer, but maybe that is because I am writing to you. Maybe it’s because the deer have smelled my presence and avoided the danger. Just like me when I smell plastic in a fire, my brain tells me it might be danger and I should avoid it.

It would be almost perfect if our senses at birth were already educated to the dangers we would encounter, and how we should process those dangers. Unfortunately, we must learn what some would call, “the hard way”. For me, the hard way seems to be the only way to learn. I say things keep me awake, but they do not necessarily keep me from sleep. They are more an unexpected reminder of an event in a life lived with purpose and direction.

My father had little to say, but he said a few things that stuck. “Son leave this earth better than you found it”. Living by my father’s words I will keep trying to do that. In the process I will educate my senses more and more.  There will be times the education will be a danger and other times it will be the puppy smell that takes me back to when my senses were clueless.