Keys on the Roof & Grass in My Sheets

I’m a sleepwalker. I didn’t realize it until my 30s, when my kids were little. One night, my husband was out of town. I’d been watering the grass before bed, and as I crawled under the covers, I thought, “Hmm, I wonder if I turned the water hose off?”

The next morning, I woke up to something… odd. There were blades of grass in my sheets. Not dirt. Not leaves tracked in by the kids. Grass. I remember just lying there thinking, “Well, that’s weird.” Then I noticed my cell phone was missing. I tore the house apart looking for it. Couch cushions. Kitchen counters. Bathroom. Nothing. Then I heard it, ringing, but muffled and far away. It was outside. I finally found it sitting neatly by the water hose.

And the hose? Turned off. That’s when it hit me: I had gone outside, in the middle of the night, and turned off the water in my sleep. This reminded me of my brother Richard, who also sleepwalked.

He once stayed at our house while he was working construction. We set up a bed for him in the living room, right across from my giant fish tank full of beautiful fish. One night, I was sitting on the couch when Richard stood up, walked across the room, picked up that fish tank, and dumped it straight onto the floor. Water, gravel, plants, fish, everywhere!

Granny had always warned us, “Never wake a sleepwalker,” so I sat there frozen, mouth wide open, watching him go back to bed like nothing had happened. Then I sprang into action, scooping up fish, putting them into water glasses, and trying to save them from flopping into the heater vents in the floor.

Fast forward a few months. After another night of sleepwalking, I sent the kids off to school and found my car windows halfway down and the sunroof open. You have to turn the car on to do that. I had zero memory of being in the car. And my keys? Gone. Completely vanished.

I used the spare set and went on with life. Months later, we had our roof redone after a hailstorm. The roofer came down the ladder holding something in his hand, looking puzzled. “My guess is these are yours?” He was holding my car keys. On. The. Roof.

When I finally told my husband about all of this, expecting panic, shock, something, he just nodded and said, “Well, we better put a cowbell on the doors.”

So now I’m just out here waiting for Amazon to deliver my cowbell… and maybe a helmet.