For us early morning folk, the time change gives us back our mojo. No longer fumbling in the dark on waking. Now a rim of light glows around the edges of the shade.
I walk down to my office window to find a palette of color. The corals of sunrise and the oranges of autumn make dawns as rosy-fingered as Homer said they were.
I know what’s waiting around the corner. This light will not last. Mornings will grow dark again. But for the moment, I’m reveling in them.
At 6:45 there is barely any light in the sky. Holiday displays mark the boundaries of street and yard. Our beacon, as they’re intended to be. As for other illumination, it’s still scarce. How easy it is this time of year to think that darkness is winning.
I look out my office window, can barely make out each tree trunk. But the longer I stare, the more individual limbs and branches begin to show themselves, a filigree of darkness against the lightening clouds. The sky is a blotter sopping up the light. Darkness still reigns on ground level; nothing distinct down there yet. No trampoline, garden bench or witch hazel tree. All of that is out of sight, a void. Instead, my eyes are drawn toward the sky, and toward a faint blush of pink gathering around the tree line.
My window faces south, so the big show is out of sight, to my left. I walk into the other room, peer out the window. Dawn barely underway. A smudge of red on the horizon. But walking back in here just 15 minutes later, what a change. Now I see the covered garden bench, the limbs of the witch hazel tree, the white husks of the shells bordering its garden, the azalea and its entourage. The border of leaves and grass.
By 7:12 it is unqualifiedly morning. What a difference 28 minutes can make.
An early walk this morning, into a day just dawning. I leave my earphones out for a while to take in the bird calls, a steady ripple of sound punctuated by the brisk staccato of the woodpecker’s drill.
Walking before 7, something I seldom do these days, is such a gift. It gives us the day before it’s lost its creases and its curls, while it’s still fresh and still.
Sometimes I see a fox skulking home after a long night of hunting. Other times a young deer, hiding in the grass.
In early morning, the day is still a wild thing. It does not yet belong to us — if it ever does.
I often have a little debate with myself in the morning: should I walk first or should I write? I’ll do both eventually, of course. They are the warp and woof of my day. Twenty-four hours without them is barely a day at all.
But there remains the order. To walk early is to give the body precedence when the mind is sharpest. To write early is to miss the coolest and most pleasant hours of the day.
Today, walking raised its hand, waved it in front of my face. Choose me, choose me, it said.
And so … I did.
Sometimes, the best way to start the morning is by reading an obituary. Not just any obituary, though. It needs to be one like that of Arthur Riggs, 82, who with a colleague, Keiichi Ikatura, developed synthetic insulin. Riggs died March 23.
I learned that Riggs and Ikatura developed a genetic technique that led to the first human-designed and human-made gene that would function in any organism. This paved the way for the creation of synthetic insulin, a “lifesaving development for millions of people with diabetes,” the Washington Post said.
Before this discovery, people with diabetes relied on insulin from cows, which had a high rate of allergic reactions. The synthetic insulin avoids this risk.
Dr. Riggs lived in the same house for 50 years, drove “modest cars,” said the obituary … and quietly gave away much of the money he earned from royalties on patents — $310 million — to the institution he helped to found. The name of the institution: the City of Hope.
(Ikatura and Riggs in 1978. Photo courtesy City of Hope.)
I’m up early enough today that the morning is still getting to know itself. Crickets have yet to turn in; their chirps form the rhythm section for which bird song supplies the melody.
Copper has not only gone outside but has scampered down the deck stairs, an accomplishment no longer guaranteed and thus appreciated more. And in other pet news, when I uncovered the birds, Toby, the newbie, had found the highest perch and looked quite pleased with himself.
I hear bluejays and crows calling as I rise from the couch to make my tea. The back door is open. The back yard is mowed. Reading and weeding await me.
The details of a day I’m privileged to watch unfold.
(A photo I took Saturday, a few miles from home.)
There was time for an early walk this morning, a chilly start to a day that has already warmed considerably. But a few hours ago, I bundled up and crunched along the gravel berm, thinking about the hours soon to be unfolding.
It had been a while since I walked early, preferring the lunch-time stroll when temperatures are below freezing. But with warmer air and earlier dawns, that is shifting.
The day is different when you walk in the morning. It stretches out endlessly and without complications. At noontime, the work of the day is very much in my mind. But the morning belongs to the half-awake brain and the thoughts that weave in and out of it.
When I woke at 5:40, morning had begun. It was seeping in around the window shades and filling the room not with light but with something that wasn’t darkness, either. A vague shift of shadow, a sharper awareness of shapes.
I lay there a while, thinking it was still dark enough to sleep and that would also be a good way to start a Tuesday, also, perhaps better than jumping out of bed. But the morning won out. There was an insistence to it: Come on, get up. What are you waiting for?
Once downstairs, the morning fulfilled its promise, putting out a steady clear light from the east, which I stationed myself to watch by sitting in the big blue chair. It’s been a light fest ever since, a treat we can continue to enjoy as days lengthen and expand.
A long winter, an even longer year. The light is welcome.
I thought I would write about voting on November 3, 2020, an election day long awaited, long feared. But I figure I’ll have plenty to say about the election tomorrow.
What strikes me as words-worthy today is the morning, is finding it again in the wreckage of Eastern Daylight Time, discovering its glimmering, shimmering self among the ruins of the warmth and the tattered leaves of autumn.
Fall-back has given some of us an extra hour to clean the closets and others a welcome roll back to sleep early Sunday morning.
But for me, it’s been a way to reclaim the morning, regaining what I lost in my quest for more sleep, which are these precious golden hours before the day begins. I’ve been missing those — and now, at least for a few days, I have them again.
Walking an older doggie first thing in the morning has its minuses. I’d much rather let the day unravel slowly, in fuzzy robe and slippers, staying inside and writing or reading until I’ve been awake for an hour or two.
But walking an older doggie first thing has its pluses, too, and that’s what I’m thinking about today. Being out early, when the day is just beginning, means I can take a measure of it, can sniff out its aromas, attend to its sounds. A little less bird song, a little less humidity, a lot more sunshine.
Being out early helps me understand that each day is a gift — one that we can relish or ignore.
