When I went to visit my best friend, we were planning on spending all night talking and drinking wine.
I hadn’t seen her since she got married and moved out west, and I was excited.
Her husband was away on maneuvers, and I was her first choice for company. We were sitting on her verandah enjoying wine and laughing about old times, when she suggested we sleep out in the desert. I had to laugh, because I knew how many snakes and other biting animals were out there. She said she and her husband often slept in the desert. They had a tent to sleep in, and it was quite comfortable. I asked what they did for air conditioning. When she said it got too cold at night to worry about air conditioning, I almost laughed. She said the desert cooled off so much when the sun went down that they sometimes wished they had a portable heater to keep them warm. I wasn’t having any of it, and I said she could sleep in the desert, but I was staying here where there was a bed, and no creepy crawlies. That night, I was laying in bed when I felt something crawling on my face. I screamed, and my friend came running in. she told me I was lucky because it wasn’t a poisonous bug, but an annoying one. She took it off my bed and put it outside. I wasn’t wondering if it wouldn’t have been safer to sleep in a tent and worry about getting cold than opting for air conditioning and getting bitten by a scorpion.