Early to rise
morning visions
I usually get up around five, no matter how late I get to bed. The curtains in my bedroom windows are transparent, and even if pulled they let the light in. I’m not sure if that’s what wakes me, but once I see that the world is grey I am eager to get up.
I go downstairs and take food out to the feral cats, Kiki and Greyfur, who come when I call them. They look pretty good considering the outdoor life for a cat is full of peril and outdoor cats have short life spans. Kiki and Greyfur eat well at my house, though, and I know of at least one neighbor who also feeds Kiki. Their fur is smooth and not dull, and if they get a cut they heal quickly. Yes, they are both ear-tipped, so no kittens from them.
Then I make coffee for myself in my Aeropress, make a plate of food for Holly, my most satisfactory cat I got from a shelter the day after Christmas last year. My indoor feral, Mama, will come eat from it too. On a clear day, I see the beginnings of sun, and I track the splendor of the rise. The birds accompany the sight with their song, and when it’s light enough they line up vertically along the feeders.
I live on a very busy street, but you wouldn’t know it from the action of my back yard. Yesterday I had a truly magical half hour of watching. At first I saw something move, but it was still dark and I couldn’t see what it was. Gradually, as my eyesight adjusted, I saw more movement, and soon it became legible as a mother raccoon and seven young. Seven! Is there anything more fetching than a baby raccoon? The only word that exactly describes what they were doing is ‘gamboling.’ They were gamboling on the lawn, and wrestling and rolling downhill, just as my brother and I used to do on the redoubts at Valley Forge. (Can anyone who grew up on stories of the freezing winter George Washington and his troops spent at Valley Forge not think of it and shudder gratefully everyday when you slip into your shoes?)
A sound came from the house behind and the raccoon youth ran up the oak tree. Once again I had the simple yet guiding thought that we humans have holes in our heads to think we are superior to the other animals, or to label these beautiful and highly sociable and capable creatures as pests.
I might see the gentle fawns making their leggy, curious journeys across the grass, getting big enough now that they don’t bleat when their mother goes out of view. I might see the mother rabbit standing under the feeder waiting for the birds to knock some seed down. Her babes are in the front garden under the hydrangea.
I am no Mary Oliver running on all fours through the marshes or eating turtle eggs, but I have my own suburban version of a life in the larger world in the early mornings, under the rising sun that, for a moment, shines its light up at the underside of the leaves on my desk-facing maple.
Then I want to write.
Here are a few links for the morning.
I loved listening to this essay by Rebecca Griggs, Noiseless Messengers, about a visitation of moths. She is a writer from Australia who wrote the extraordinary Fathoms: The World in the Whale that was brilliantly reviewed by Verlyn Klinkenborg here.
The Last Conversation You'll Ever Need to Have about Eating Right. One of the conversationalists is Mark Bittman who has edged over to plant-based eating.
An essay I wrote for Lit Hub about how I came to understand a species of Character Change in fiction.
And here’s an interesting craft essay by Mary Gaitskill about description that laments the loss of attention to a certain kind of detail. I’m with her on this.
