Early Hours

By Annette P. King

Happy News Citizen Journalist

It is under a gray canopy early morning here on Spruce Knoll, lights turn to orange soon as the sun comes up from behind the trees, and I'm left with a prayer of delight and well wishes for the world around me. It's where I find God these quiet summer mornings! That is if our morning doesn't start with fog. This summer we've had plenty of 'pea-soup' weather. I can't understand why it's taken me so long to embrace something as simple as a foggy morning and all the other small things fog brings like worms, slugs, and odd-like caterpillars.

Fog can be interesting the way it hides everything before it begins to reveal first the trees that fringe the property, then the cottage in the distance, then creeping its way up to the garden by eight/nine o'clock. Lately, the heavy moisture seems to please our lean garden for it is yielding two small cucumbers occasionally. Its rolling continues on up to the deck where the geraniums ignore the white wet stuff and continue showing off vivid reds and greens even in pouring rain.

The day doesn't start with thoughts of the weather before daybreak, however. It takes all my concentrative powers to pull myself out of bed. It is only 5 a.m., but early is fine - being a farmer's daughter who still thinks it's the best part of the day. By six I'm dressed as if leaving home, which is the key to my stability and perhaps better than all the drugs taken to get started.

Standing outdoors before breakfast, sometimes no further than the deck, there is much pleasure fastening my eyes to the trees or looking around the garden. The passion for plants, though they came this summer in the form of weeds, never stops. I make no further excuses for a garden full of wild intruders, either. I have come to realize lots can be learned from weeds. They grow in their own fascinating beauty and attract their own unusual bugs and birds.

This morning bending over with his back toward me I was watching my spouse, an animal lover, there in the garden when a brown rabbit jumped out from behind the rock wall. He missed it. I failed to alert him, frozen a moment I suppose. It was only a few minutes earlier we waved good-bye to our overnight friends rolling down the drive heading toward their home in Old Orchard. We had hoped to see a deer sitting outside the evening before while enjoying those few hours together that continued around the breakfast table this morning. The rabbit must have been there in the garden before Gerry, hiding while greedily eating half of our day's quota of vegetables. Actually, one little brown rabbit's presence gives us more pleasure than the early harvest.

Mary Oliver's poem, Morning Poem brings to mind those days familiar—the quiet ones and the ones filled with company. She ends her lovely verse touching on nature and spirituality: …"each pond with its blazing lilies/ is a prayer heard and answered/ lavishly, every morning/ whether or not/ you have ever dared to be happy/ whether or not/ you have ever dared to pray." Those words express the peacefulness of the summer days shrinking quickly.

This story was produced by a Happynews Citizen Journalist.

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Annette P. King is the author of Growing Up On Academy Hill, two family cookbooks, and a chapbook Toward Evening. Her poems have appeared in Off The Coast, a bimonthly magazine, and several of her short stories and poems have been published in Maine Fellowship of Christian Writers Anthology.