I Sleep Well at Night

The big day is finally here. It's cold and gray, but I'm strangely at peace.

Although I fought the idea at first, as the adoptive mother I am pretty well powerless. Surrendering to that has advantages.

When I was a kid, we had a book of bedtime stories, morality tales, all. My favorite still intrigues me. It's set in a farming community. A stranger arrives at a farm, looking for a job. When asked for his qualifications, all he says is, "I sleep well at night." No one understands that, but they need help and he looks strong.

The young man turns out to be a hard worker and quite pleasant. The spring planting season passes and summer comes on. Late in the summer, a terrible storm blows up. The farmer's family and all the other farmhands wake in the night and run all around, checking their haystacks and making sure everything is covered and secured the best ways possible. Only the young stranger remains in bed.

The next day, the farmer asks why he didn't get up with the others. "I told you when I came here," he says. "I sleep well at night. I work very hard to do things right the first time so I don't have to worry, no matter what happens." When they went out to check how the farm had weathered the storm, they found all this young man's haystacks in tact, all his areas of the barn still ship-shape.

I've already built my haystacks. The only thing left to do is try to sleep well at night.