A tiny, tiny sliver
Anyone who knows me well, knows I like mornings. Except for a brief period in high school where I would sleep in until (gasp!) 9:00am, I have always been an early riser. The morning is mine, all mine, as the sun sparkles off freshly laid dew, and even the dark of pre-dawn is so much quieter and friendlier than the sinister post-dusk blackness. Walking through the woods with the early chill on them, owning the roads before other people clutter them, sipping coffee with a book before anyone else is awake.
The past two weeks we have been getting up well before dawn for work in order to watch the birds fly off from their roosts to their foraging ground. While this involves sharing my precious early hour with my boss, it also involves watching a panoply of stars fade into the dawn, with the tiny, tiny sliver of the waning moon silhouetting bands of tricolored herons, glossy ibis, and snowy egrets as they cease their somnolence and leave the safety of their willow bower for the foraging fields of the marsh. A fair number of fishermen join our aquatic pilgrimage to the boatramps of Lake Okeechobee, but somehow anyone out at that hour is a participant in the solitude, not a breaker of it. We cheat the sun with his burning radiation by catching him still in his pajamas, still groggy with sleep in his eyes, and are gone before he can get going.
A perfectly lovely time to be alive.
The past two weeks we have been getting up well before dawn for work in order to watch the birds fly off from their roosts to their foraging ground. While this involves sharing my precious early hour with my boss, it also involves watching a panoply of stars fade into the dawn, with the tiny, tiny sliver of the waning moon silhouetting bands of tricolored herons, glossy ibis, and snowy egrets as they cease their somnolence and leave the safety of their willow bower for the foraging fields of the marsh. A fair number of fishermen join our aquatic pilgrimage to the boatramps of Lake Okeechobee, but somehow anyone out at that hour is a participant in the solitude, not a breaker of it. We cheat the sun with his burning radiation by catching him still in his pajamas, still groggy with sleep in his eyes, and are gone before he can get going.
A perfectly lovely time to be alive.