another morning

I REALLY ENJOY the early morning. I usually wake up by six, sometimes much before. On work days I set my phone to jingle to make sure I don’t forget what time it is and not get R & M’s breakfast and lunches started. It’s strange, but I never enjoyed getting up so early before I retired. Hmmm. Must have had something to do with having to go to work!

Today I put the little dogs out, started the eggs, piled the lunch fixings on the counter and started in making sandwiches, rolling Rachael’s meat rolls and putting stuff in baggies. When the lunches were finished I put the fixings away and sat down to a few cheese cubes and a pile of grapes with my early morning coffee. It was nice tosit there in the quiet. I spent some time in prayer and after that I was remembering other mornings in my life.

Probably my favorites are the ones I spent with Notah in Belen. He leaves for work almost every morning by six, many times he is going as early as five and very rarely by four-thirty. When I was with them my chair was in the family room adjacent to the kitchen. We never had stirring conversations; Notah is too much his mother’s son for that. But we did always share a few words sometimes about what was in store for his day or about a snake he had seen the night before or something else mundane to our mutual interests. It was dark, with only the flicker of the TV news and weather. The time was only a quiet few minutes at the start of the day. Then he would leave and I would sit and watch the morning come up across the hills and valley beyond