A day in the life.

For a while now, I've been banging awake around 5am, languishing in that warm you're-comfy-and-you-know-it zone of semi-sleep, before finally grabbing myself by the face and dragging myself out of bed a little before 6. It's nice: I used to be a very solitary animal, an only child, lived alone for years, and despite the no-BS absolute joy and astonishing privilege of baby/wife/job/etc. responsibilities, a part of me will always be the sibling-less kid building universes in his imagination alone in his room, who still worships the stillness of solitude. So I get some of that in my mornings.

I do most of my writing during those soft, quiet, precious hours (in my head, because I can't actually write at that hour, because I beat on keyboards like a rented mule when I do write and would wake the entire house). I watch the sun rise, and the snow melt, and the flowers grow, and wither, and disappear under a new season's blanket of white, and listen to the hum of nothing in my ears, and breathe.

My water well is almost 400 feet deep and taps an aquifer. When we moved here, we had the water tested to make sure there was nothing harmful to Lola, and the testers told us they had never, ever come across water as pure and perfect as what comes out of our taps. Before I go to bed each night, I pour a glass and place it on a kitchen windowsill next to a barely-cracked-open window...and then, in the morning, with the first hues of sunrise tickling the mountain, I drink deep of the blood of the Earth cooked and then cooled to perfection by the breath of the wind.

This morning, I woke, rose, padded quietly to the kitchen, reached for my glass...and paused. There were five huge wild turkeys in my back yard: four females and one male...and oh by God and sonny Jesus, was the male putting on a show. Puffed up like a dirigible, fantail fanning behind, strutting and strutting and strutting, big as life and twice as turkey, The Man, because it's finally mating season, don'tcha know...and the four females could not have disdained him more thoroughly. Dude was out of luck, period, end of file.

...so I raised my precious water glass to him in salute, drank deeply, and thought to myself, "Yeah, I hated the dating scene, too, brother."

A day in the life.