Nary a leaf is stirring as I greet the dawn
I have a new routine, that I have practiced for two weeks now.
Full disclosure: I have not actually done this since last Thursday. But I plan to resume tomorrow so I think I am safe in saying that it is my new routine.
It is getting up at five thirty in the morning to walk for forty-five minutes.
I climbed a bit up into their yard to photograph these
Let's get one thing out of the way immediately: your pirate is no stripe of an early riser. She is a night owl of the first water.
I did rise early for many years, when my children were small and when I worked outside my home.
But left to my own devices, I will stay up until midnight or later, and sleep until nine o'clock in the morning.
Mind your toesies
Even then, I start out slow: Coffee and reading, and relaxing, for at least an hour after I wake up, become ambulatory, and feed my pets.
So why, you may be wondering, would I opt to get up at the exact crack of dawn and take a walk?
Because once the sun comes up, it is approximately six and a half million degrees here, with ten thousand percent humidity.
The 'hood seems full but then there's this vacant lot
I don't do the hot summer sun. With the exception of, say, walking to and from my car at a store, which cannot be avoided, or the occasional foray outside, of necessity, without hewing to the shade, I stay under cover during the hot months.
Many of you, being morning people, know the pure beauty of first light, and that lovely true morning hour.
When I open my garage door at about five forty each morning, AirPods in place, listening to a book on Audible, it is still dark out although the sky is that particular purplish-blue that presages both full day and full night.
This one is marked Do Not Disturb
As I walk, it lightens by the minute until it's three-quarters full daylight by the time I get back home -- but still no sun shining down on me.
By then it's almost six thirty. TG is still asleep, his normal rising hour being around eight o'clock.
And don't judge but after walking five thousand or so steps and taking a quick shower, I go right back to my pillow, to snooze for another hour or so.
This way Soylent Green?
Sometimes I even go all the way back to sleep, then get up at my usual nine-ish.
It's working out fine which is why you may be wondering why I was too lazy to get up before proper daylight and walk for the past four days.
Well for one, I don't walk on Sundays, so that's only three days.
It's a sleepy time of day
And two, we have had three parties since last Thursday.
I've done the preparation and cooking for all three, with the exception of Chad grilling the meat course for Dagny's birthday party on Friday night.
I'm beginning to feel as though I cannot leave my house without a cooler full of food and four dozen roses.
The sky is beginning to enchant
So the one-word answer to your query is: exhaustion.
But I'll tell you all about those parties later this week.
Now I want to talk about my walk.
Street lamps still shine up into trees
We live in a large neighborhood, the houses of which were beginning to be built fifty-odd years ago.
Ours was one of the first to go up. We have lived here since August of 2005.
The first owners of our house built it to live in, but sold it after three years.
This is the home of a United States Veteran
The Marshalls, from whom we bought it, were a young family when they purchased the house and moved in, reared their children, and lived here for thirty years.
We met the Marshalls only once, when we came to the house on the day of closing. They were senior citizens and empty-nesters by then.
Several weeks ago Erica had come to visit me and I was outside with her at her car, helping her bring the children in, when an unfamiliar pickup truck pulled into our driveway.
This landscaping though
The tall, handsome, middle-aged man wearing dress clothes, very sharp, looked vaguely familiar to me but he had to speak before I realized who he was.
He was one of the Marshall children who grew up in our house, being about eight years old when his parents moved the family there.
TG and I met him last summer when we attended a block party to chat and eat watermelon at a neighbor's house about a hundred yards from us, and he came by and was reminiscing with folks he knew.
The pirate calls this poetic planting
On this day he was accompanied by his wife, and they were coming from his mother's funeral which had taken place that morning.
I offered my condolences and urged them to come in and see the ways we'd changed the house over the years, and so they did, and he told us about the way it was back in the day.
Like most people when going back to a place they knew well as a child, he said it looked so small to him.
Crape Myrtles on parade
I assured him that it's not small when you start cleaning twenty-three hundred-plus square feet of floors.
He saw where the deck had served its purpose and was all torn up, in the throes of reconstruction, and recalled when his dad, who he described as a jackleg carpenter, originally built it.
(I don't think he meant any disrespect; it was a perfectly good deck and served us for a long time. He just meant that his dad was not trained or particularly skilled as a carpenter, but despite that, he was a hard worker and did what was necessary.)
A most charming suburban domicile
He said that his three siblings would be jealous to learn that he'd been in the old house, and been welcome there, and walked around the place that was their childhood home.
I said they could come by any time, as long as they let me know first.
Our subdivision (if you want to call it that) is full of mature trees, mostly pines but many other varieties too.
What exactly are they getting at
It has the normal assortment of floor plans and house types for a neighborhood of its age.
The thing that has always impressed me about where we live is how quiet it is. You can walk in the middle of the day and it's still quiet, but at daybreak it is still as tombs.
As I walk I'm listening to a book and progressing at a steady pace and there are several long hills to get the heart rate up, and no cars pass, and no dogs bark.
Time to turn a corner
The birds are going crazy in the trees but that's not noise; it's sweet music. I can hear them even through the narrator reading my book.
Many of the folks who live around here have those meticulously kept houses and front yards and flower beds that are a joy to behold at any time of day, but which are so calm and serene at this hour, they're like a dream.
I marvel at what some people accomplish in the way of landscaping. I lack that skill -- not to mention ambition -- in spades. See what I did there?
A fine example of creative brickwork
Lights are still shining -- safety beacons on the houses, porch lights, street lamps -- and they give such an in-between look to the hushed streets.
Fifteen minutes into my walk I come to the place where, in the near distance, a rooster is crowing his heart out into the new day. He sounds positively frantic and he is LOUD and repetitive. What a noodle.
But there's barely a hint of the sweltering heat and screaming cicadas and suburban car traffic that will rule the atmosphere just a few hours later.
These are ravings
Some utility company or other has been spray-painting on our streets for some time now.
Cryptic symbols and words and arrows and circles and triangles and dotted lines show up every few feet. Different colors are used: yellow, white, green, blue, neon orange.
I would never actually do it but part of me wants to buy a few cans of spray paint -- I think I'd use pink and purple, maybe gold -- and draw hearts and flowers all around their designs.
Perhaps the most stunning flowerbeds in the vicinity
Just to make it look a little nicer.
But do you enjoy your walk? You may be thinking now. It sounds like a pleasant enough interlude.
The answer is both yes and no.
And a second, even nicer one
My feelings land somewhere in the middle of delight and dread.
Sometimes when my alarm sounds in my pitch-dark bedroom and I come to consciousness from deep sleep, I think, I must be crazy to even think about getting up and walking down the street right now.
What about stranger danger?
When I see this, I know I'm nearly home
The early bird may get the worm like honey catches flies, but I am interested in neither worms nor flies.
I just want to sleep. So I remind myself that in a mere hour, I will be reunited with my pillow and that while getting dressed and going out to walk may be a tad bit uncomfortable, it's doubtful that I'll die.
Does it do me any good? I don't know. Does anyone know? I guess I must think it does, or I wouldn't do it. What do you think?
My own dusk-to-dawn lights are still gleaming when I get home
At any rate, over the course of a few days last week I took these pictures for you as I paraded around in the dawn light, and I hope you have enjoyed going walkies with me at break of day.
I'll be back out there tomorrow -- that is a promise -- and if you are awake at five thirty in the Eastern time zone, I hope you'll think of me.
Later in the week I promise to tell you all about our latest spate of parties.
And that is all for now.
=0=0=0=
Happy Monday
